Prompt Message When Closing a Drawing
Do some Searching. This [or something very similar] has come up before. There's probably a solution involving UNDEFINE-ing the CLOSE and EXIT and QUIT commands, and making new definitions of them that would ask that question of the User first -- probably not a difficult thing to build if you don't find anything suitable.
[I seem to recall that the upper-right-corner-X way of Closing didn't always actually use the CLOSE command, so there was the problem of invoking such a thing when that was picked. But checking now in Acad2016 that I have here, the individual-drawing X does call up CLOSE, and the overall-program X does call up QUIT, so custom command definitions ought to work.]
Kent Cooper, AIA 
@ronjonp wrote:
What about automating adding these dates? That would kill two birds with one code. ....
The OP may disagree, but I don't like that idea. If I just open a drawing to refer to something, or Copy something from it to Paste into another drawing, but don't actually do anything that changes it, or even if I do something but then decide to Undo it all, I wouldn't want it to register as a revision.
Kent Cooper, AIA
Accepted solution
@Kent1Cooper wrote:
.... custom command definitions ought to work.]
In simplest terms:
(command "_.undefine" "CLOSE")
(defun C:CLOSE (/ yesno)
(initget 1 "Yes No"); no Enter allowed -- must answer the question
(setq yesno (getkword "\nHave you updated Revision Dates for this drawing? [Yes/No]: "))
(if (= yesno "Yes")
(command "_.close")
(quit); that is, quit this routine -- not the same as QUIT command
); if
); defun
BUT that assumes you always want them to update the revision date [or to lie about it], regardless of what they may have done or not done in the drawing, because it won't invoke the native CLOSE command unless they answer "Yes." Should there be some kind of "No, but there's no reason to" option, for the situations I mentioned in my Reply to @ronjonp's automating suggestion?
It could also be built to have either Yes or No offered as a default answer, requiring only Enter/space to accept it.
If that [or a more flexible version if needed] works, do the same with EXIT and QUIT. But in all cases, there's the work-around possibility for those who don't want to be bothered, and who are knowledgeable enough, that they can just type in .CLOSE [with the decimal/period prefix], and get the native command directly, bypassing the re-definition.
EDIT: Fixed the code [I left out an important part before...], so if you copied it before this EDIT appeared, try again.
Kent Cooper, AIA
@Anonymous wrote:
.... after I select yes it asks: "Really want to discard the changes to this drawing? <N>:" How would I be able to get rid of that? If there's no way to get rid of it the code does the trick. ....
That's because of this from Message 1: "...with a YES/NO input from the user come up when they close a drawing. After that, it would bring up the normal save/close screen." I assumed that since it's about the CLOSE command, the end of that should really say "it would bring up the normal close command," and I also assumed that it should do so only if the answer about updating the revision date was "Yes" [because if it was "No," you'd want them to do that before Closing]. In the case of a "Yes" answer, it's still possible that a User might have updated the revision date earlier on, and might have done some other things since, which would trigger that prompt, and I would think you'd want that to be asked, not to get rid of it. If you really do want it bypassed, do I assume correctly that you would want the answer about discarding changes to be "No," so that what's been done would be saved? If so, you can change the one line to add the answer:
(command "_.close" "_no")
which seems to also eliminate the hanging up problem in your other Message. [I can't otherwise explain that -- it also hangs up at that prompt for me when I run just (command "_.close") manually, but not when I include the "_no" answer.]
[I find it quite curious, but noteworthy, that if there have been changes since the last saving operation, the dialog-box CLOSE command prompt is whether you want to Save changes, but the command-line prompt is whether to discard them.]
Kent Cooper, AIA
@Anonymous wrote:
.... is there a way that it could look at the drawing to see if our title block exists? If it finds the block it will use the redefined command and if not it will use the _.close command?
If the Title Block is not a dynamic Block [for which the "name" of an insertion of it isn't the Block name itself], you can find out this way:
(ssget "_X" '((2 . "YourTitleBlockName")))
If that returns other than nil, then at least one insertion [or Xref] of it exists in the current drawing. [If there's no insertion of it, but the definition exists in the drawing, that code won't reveal the fact, but that can also be determined if needed.]
Kent Cooper, AIA
