Infrastructure Modeling DevBlog

Is there a way to determine if a specific Style object is in-use?

By Partha Sarkar

In Civil 3D UI, if we expand the styles collection of a Civil 3D object, you will notice the yellow triangle next to it which indicates this style is 'in-use', e.g. in the screenshot we see the style collection of Surface styles which are in use -

 

In Civil 3D 2014 .NET API, we have a very useful API StyleBase.IsUsed which will tell us if a particular style is in-use.  Here is a relevant C# code snippet :

 

foreach (ObjectId surfaceStyleId in civilDoc.Styles.SurfaceStyles)

{

  //  Open each style object to check if it is "in-use" 

 

  SurfaceStyle csStyle = surfaceStyleId.GetObject(OpenMode.ForRead) as SurfaceStyle;

  if (csStyle.IsUsed)

    surfaceStyleNameColl = surfaceStyleNameColl + "\n " + csStyle.Name.ToString();

}

 

 

 

AUTOCAD Civil 3D API Wishlist Survey, 2013

By Partha Sarkar

Each year we organize a survey to find out what improvements you'd like to see on the AutoCAD® Civil 3D® API front. Here is your chance this year round to provide some feedback:  Click here to take survey

The survey is ending on the 15^th of June 2013.

Don’t miss this opportunity to send us your wish list. Thank you in advance! :)

Creating a SectionView and setting its elevation range using .NET API

By Partha Sarkar

Civil 3D 2014 .NET API has a static method to create a new SectionView which takes three parameters and adds a new  SectionView -   public static ObjectId Create(string sectionViewName,      ObjectId sampleLineId,    Point3d location) 

Once we add a new SectionView, next we can set the maximum and minimum elevation using the following property : 

SectionView.ElevationMax -> Gets or sets the maximum elevation of the section view.

SectionView.ElevationMin  -> Gets or sets the minimum elevation of the section view.

 

When we add a new SectionView by default the 'Elevation range' is set to "Automatic". If we want to set it to "User specified" as shown in the screenshot below using the API, then we need to set the IsElevationRangeAutomatic property to false. Otherwise, trying to set the ElevationMin or ElevationMax will throw an exception : The minimum elevation can't be set when elevation range is selected to automatic.

 

 

Here is the relevant C# .NET code snippet on how to create a new SectionView and set the Elevation Range :

// get the Editor

Editor ed = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Editor;

 

//select a sampleline to add a SectionView

PromptEntityOptions selsampleline = new PromptEntityOptions("\nSelect a SampleLine Object: ");

selsampleline.SetRejectMessage("\nOnly Civil 3D SampleLine is allowed");

selsampleline.AddAllowedClass(typeof(SampleLine), true);

PromptEntityResult resSL = ed.GetEntity(selsampleline);

if (resSL.Status != PromptStatus.OK) return;

ObjectId sampleLineId = resSL.ObjectId;

 

 

Database db = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Database;

CivilDocument civilDoc = CivilApplication.ActiveDocument;

 

using (Transaction trans = db.TransactionManager.StartTransaction())

{

 

// public static ObjectId Create(string sectionViewName, ObjectId sampleLineId, Point3d location)       

 

// lets select the location of the newly created section view

Point3d location ;

PromptPointResult ppr = ed.GetPoint("\nSelect a Location for the new SectionView:");

if (ppr.Status != PromptStatus.OK)

  return;

location = ppr.Value;      

 

// add the SectionView

ObjectId sectionViewId = SectionView.Create("My_Test_SV", sampleLineId, location);

SectionView sectionView = trans.GetObject(sectionViewId, OpenMode.ForWrite) as SectionView;

SectionOverride overrideObj = sectionView.GraphOverrides[0];

overrideObj.Draw = true;

 

 

// When we add a new SectionView by default the 'Elevation range' is set to "Automatic".

// If we want to set it to "User specified" as shown in the screesnhot below using the API,

// then we need to set the IsElevationRangeAutomatic property to False.

 

sectionView.IsElevationRangeAutomatic = false;

 

// Following values are specific to a Civil 3D sample DWG file       

sectionView.ElevationMin = 610.00;

sectionView.ElevationMax = 700.00;

 

trans.Commit();

 

I hope this is useful to you! 

AutoCAD Map 3D API Training content: Part-6

By Gopinath Taget

This is the final post in the series titled AutoCAD Map 3D API Training content. The previous posts are: Part-1 , Part 2, Part-3, Part-4 and Part-5. In this post, I will talk about the API for creating and managing Map Layers.

There are two basic Map 3D .NET types that will help you manage your Map and Map Layers: AcMapMap and AcMapLayer. AcMapMap represents the conceptual container that contains your Map data. Put another way, it contains all the geospatial layers representing your map data. AcMapLayer represents the geospatial layer itself:

 

This presentation provides more details on the AcMapMap and AcMapLayer types. It specifically talks about important methods in AcMapMap and AcMapLayer that allow instances of these types to work with each other like accessing the Map and the Layer collection within the Map, searching for and finding a specific layer. It also talks about API for programmatically selecting and highlighting specific features on a layer. Here is a sample that demonstrates this selection API. In order to use this sample, please first build, load and run the command “BuildMap” in the SDK sample MapSDK\Map Samples\Platform\BuildMap. Once the map is created, follow the following steps:

• Open MapsAndLayers.sln in Visual Studio 2010 and build it.
• Load the assembly from step above into the Map session containing the map created using the BuildMap sample.
• Enter the command “selftrs” to select and highlight features on the “signals” layer that fall inside the rectangle defined by the extents of the raster image on the “redding” layer.

API webcast archive

By Stephen Preston

As part of our ADN Open work to move our API content to more accessible (search-engine-findable) locations, I'm posting our webcast archive to DevBlog. Some of these recordings are  old now, but still contain useful information. And, being recordings of live webcasts, they are not as polished as our DevTV recordings.

Note that some recordings are in Chinese and some in English.

 

Webcast	Language	Date
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	Chinese	30-Jul-12
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	English	17-Jul-12
AIMS API	Chinese	28-May-12
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	Chinese	23-Jun-11
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	English	15-Jun-11
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise API	Chinese	30-May-11
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	English	12-May-11
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise API	English	14-Jul-10
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	Chinese	9-Jul-10
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	Chinese	23-Jun-10
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	English	16-Jun-10
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise API	Chinese	28-May-10
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	English	12-May-10
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise API	English	11-Aug-09
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	Chinese	23-Jun-09
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	English	17-Jun-09
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise API	Chinese	9-Jun-09
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	English	12-May-09
Developer Days Online: Civil 3D	English	19-Feb-09
Developer Days Online: Geospatial	English	17-Feb-09
MapGuide Enterprise: Introduction to Fusion API	English	13-Jun-08
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	Chinese	21-May-08
Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise API	Chinese	14-May-08
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	English	1-May-08
AutoCAD MAP 3D Geospatial API	English	30-Apr-08
AutoCAD Civil 3D API	Chinese	23-Apr-08

 

AutoCAD Map 3D API Training content: Part-5

By Gopinath Taget

This is in continuation of Partha’s earlier posts on AutoCAD Map 3D API Training content: Part-1 , Part 2, Part-3 and Part-4. In this post, I will talk about the Geospatial geometry API. To start with let me state that there have been a few changes to the API organization over the years and currently, you will find all the APIs used for this post in the following assemblies:

 

All the selected assemblies above can be found in the Map 3D install folder or its subfolders.

Now, coming back to the API, the Geometry API is organized in a simple manner. There are two basic types. MgGeometry and MgGeometryComponent. MgGeometry is inherited by MgAggregateGeometry, MgCurve, MgPoint and MgRegion. MgGeometryComponent is inherited by MgCurveSegment and MgRing. In general as the names suggests, MgGeometry types represent the geometry itself and MgGeometryComponent types constitute (are contained by) the MgGeometry types:

 

The relationship between these types is explained in more detail in this presentation. A few points to note when using the geometry API:

• You should use the utility type MgGeometryFactory to create a MgGeometry object
• In the MgLinearRing type, the first and last coordinates in the coordinate collection should be identical
• When connecting segment types (base type MgCurveSegment) in segment collection, the last coordinate of a curve segment should be identical to the first segment of the next segment.
• When forming closed rings(MgLinearRing, MgCurveRing) the direction of traversal of the points in the ring indicates if it is an exterior or interior ring. The direction of traversal is counterclockwise for exterior ring and clockwise for interior rings.

You will find additional details for creating specific geometries in the presentation I provided above.

In addition to the geometry types mentioned above, there are several utility API that form a part of the geometry API. The raw geometry data can be used in three specific forms in the geometry API:

• The text based Autodesk Geometry Format (AGF) which is a plain text format
• The binary based AGF format
• Internal representations in the MgGeometry types

Geometry API comes with utility functions to manage the above types of data. The other utility of APIs allow you to determine the spatial relationship between geometry objects (contains, crosses, touches etc) and create new geometry with boolean operations (union, intersection, difference, symmitric difference).

The coordinate systems supported by the geometry API are Arbitrary X-Y, Geographic and Projected.

Finally, the geometry API allows you to create buffer geometry from existing geometry.

Here is a sample that demonstrates the usage of most of the API mentioned in this post. It implements two commands CRGEOM and CRBUFFER. CRGEOM demonstrates creation of geometry and CRBUFFER demonstrates creation of buffer geometry. In order to use the sample, do the following:

• Open Geometry.sln in Visual Studio 2010 and build the project.
• Delete the SDF if it exists NewFile.sdf (if you have used this sample before)
• Launch Map 3D and open a new drawing
• Load the .NET assembly created in step #1
• Assign the a coordinate system to the new drawing
• Draw one or more polyline entities in the drawing
• Enter the command “crgeom” and select a polyline entity. A line string feature is created from it on the API_Poly_Objects layer and inserted into NewFile.sdf in the .\Data\SDF folder. If this file doesn’t exist, it is created.
• Select a feature on the API_Poly_Objects layer and enter the command “crbuffer”. A buffer polygon is created round the feature. The buffer is created on the “Buffer_Objects” layer and inserted into Buffer.sdf in the.\Data\SDF folder

Note: If you will be revisiting this exercise later, deleting NewFile.sdf and Buffer.sdf before starting would make things easier for you. This is to ensure that both SDFs are created fresh using the same coordinate system, otherwise buffer creation would fail. Also, the Path to the SDF folders are hard coded in the sample so please modify this path to a folder convenient to you before using the sample.

Snoop Civil 3D 2014 Database (.bundle format)

By Augusto Goncalves

Following some suggestions on my previous post, here is a new version of the Snoop Civil 3D Database that is packed with the .bundle format. Just extract it under C:\Users\<your login>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins folder and it will autoload on Civil 3D 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Download the tool with source code.

Note: if you extract under C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins it will not load on 2012 version.