Fix Block comparison

[limartin]

I know I am coming late to the party, but I am trying to tweak our background processing routine and came across SETBYLAYER. My ignorance of its existence aside, can anyone enlighten me as to how this works better than the Fixblock.lsp from Manusoft?

The company has been using Fixblock since before I came here, but lately the Manusoft lisp has been failing to convert certain block entities to by layer or by block, but Setbylayer has no problem. I want to change our routine, but I need some language to convince the company that this is the way to go. "Change is bad. We fear change."

[irneb]

Fixblock does a bit more than setbylayer, it also changes the layer of the entities inside the block to "0". Setbylayer only changes the colour, linetype, lineweight, material & plotstyle - leaves the layer(s) as is. However, fixblock only changes the colour, not linetype / lineweight.

A few points I can see where the fixblock routine will give troubles:

• Annotative text will get strange sizes, as the fixblock uses entget, subst, assoc & entmod. It should rather use the vla functions, or generate only the ename & changed codes to pass to entmod.
• Dynamic blocks will be destroyed because it works on the unnamed block "name" if a changed DB is selected. This breaks the block's dynamic parameters and effectively unlinks it from its original. It should rather use the EffectiveName to obtain the block definition.
• There's some stuff which could be optimized to make fixblock run faster as well (e.g. rather than use the member function to check if the block's been fixed already, the vl-position function does the same in a lot less time). Not sure how setbylayer does it, as it's an ARX application - which in itself should run faster in any event.

Lots of things have changed in ACad (especially since 2006, 2008 & 2010) like DB's, Annotation Scales & Constraints. These all have new ways of dealing with them, but also makes for new problems which weren't an issue when fixblock was originally written.

I'd actually say neither fixblock, nor setbylayer is "good enough". They don't do everything I'd want them to. For me I'd rather write my own routine to perform exactly what I need.

[limartin]

Thanks for the response. I am seeing that "setbylayer" can do a little too much, so I had to set it to adjust 'color' only so that certain linetypes and other properties were not reset as well.

I wish I could write my own routine, but I am merely a neophyte in LISP and haven't the tools to craft my own as yet.

[Opie]

I wish I could write my own routine, but I am merely a neophyte in LISP and haven't the tools to craft my own as yet.

Don't be so hard on yourself. Writing a routine is easy. You probably already know all of the steps needed to do most tasks.

Write those steps down in plain language (non-code). Then you just have to find out what code does any portion of that step.

And then for the steps you are not sure of, you can either search (preferable) for a possible solution or post a new question for clarification.