trying to load AECUtilities.arx file

[david_devoldere]

Hi,

We are using AutoCAD as well as ACA 2008. In ACA there's this nice feature where you can override the properties of an XREF (e.g.make XREF gray). Some colleagues use AutoCAD to draw the HVAC etc. Therefor they XREF the floor-plan made in ACA to their drawing. They would like to gray out this XREF (in modelspace). Unfortunately this feature's not in ACAD. The functionality seems to be in the AECUtilities.arx file. But using appload, I'm not able to load the file into AutoCAD. Already tried to load the AECUtilitiesenu.dll first but didn't help. Anyone out there that could help me get this functionality into ACAD?
Thanks a lot in advance !!!!

[dkoch]

Hi,

We are using AutoCAD as well as ACA 2008. In ACA there's this nice feature where you can override the properties of an XREF (e.g.make XREF gray). Some colleagues use AutoCAD to draw the HVAC etc. Therefor they XREF the floor-plan made in ACA to their drawing. They would like to gray out this XREF (in modelspace). Unfortunately this feature's not in ACAD. The functionality seems to be in the AECUtilities.arx file. But using appload, I'm not able to load the file into AutoCAD. Already tried to load the AECUtilitiesenu.dll first but didn't help. Anyone out there that could help me get this functionality into ACAD?
Thanks a lot in advance !!!!

DISCLAIMER: I have not used plain AutoCAD since R14 and have never worked with ACD-A/ADT object enablers within AutoCAD.

The AutoCAD Architecture 2008 object enabler should be "built in" to AutoCAD 2008. That may not allow you to override the Display Configuration assigned to the floor plan base drawing external reference, but you should be able to set a Display Configuration and choose the "Screened" or "Reflected Screened" (or whatever you call your own Display Configuration that "grays out" the floor plan). If your engineers are using vanilla AutoCAD, that should not affect the items they draw. The only downside I can see would be if you had multiple external references using ACD-A objects and did not want to apply the "gray out" to all of them.

[david_devoldere]

Hi,

Cheers for your reply! It could be me but I can't seem to find a display manager in plain AutoCAD like there is in ACA. Nevertheless it wouldn't be the ideal solution to our problem. The function from ACA "object display" really does the job like we want it to do. I just need to get it into plain AutoCAD. We run from AutoCAD from the ACA software. this means we have all the arx files like in ACA. I'm almost certain that the function I'm looking for is in the 'AECUtilities.arx' file. I thought that the solution would be just loading the arx into plain autoCAD so that I would get the same functionality. But unfortunately, It doesn't want to load up. I get the message "Unable to load AecUtilities.arx file". Does anybody know if I have to load something else first or do something else before loading this file? Or is there another reason why it's not loading?

[Steve_Bennett]

If you are trying to load arx and dll files from ACA into Autocad, that will not work. You need to download the object enabler from Autodesks website for the correct version of AutoCAD to display things properly in AutoCAD from ACA. There is much more than a couple dll files and arx files that make ACA run.

[david_devoldere]

Sorry I still don't understand. The object enabler is automatically build in in ACAD 2008 no? We have ACA and run the AutoCAD from the installation of ACA. If you start up ACA and change the profile from ACA to ACAD it works. When you do it the other way around (start from ACAD and change to ACA through the tools/options menu and then 'profiles') it looks like you're in ACA but you do not get the function of "displayobject" after right clicking an xref. So I started to look at the differences between the two profiles. It seems that the file AECUtilities.ARX is not loaded in ACAD and that's where this function's in. I dubbelchecked this by opening ACA and unloading this ARX. At that moment I had the same functionalities like I had when I started from ACAD and changed the profile to ACA: when you right click the xref it gives you a menu with only +/-5 functions instead of the longer list in full ACA (and in that list there's the function display objects)

So it really looks like I should be able to make a profile that's between ACA and ACAD... one that looks like ACAD but uses the AECUtilities.ARX. I was just hoping that I forgot to do something while loading the arx...

Hopefully someone has a trick up his sleeve?

[Steve_Bennett]

If you look at the properties for the deskotp shortcut created by the installation of ACA, there is a string of text like so:

/ld "C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Architecture 2008\AecBase.dbx"

That is the function that loads all the ACA tools. Outside of that, I'm at a loss as to why you want to do what you're doing. I understand you want a vanilla autocad interface with ACA tools, but my thoughts are that you are going about this the wrong way. It took them years to finally get the arx functions fully seperated from each other. Before the 2006 release it was very difficult to keep the tools seperate which really caused problems for those using ADT as vanilla AutoCAD when they tried to share with others who only had vanilla acad.

If you want ACA functionality, but want the interface to look like AutoCAD, get into the CUI, load the Acad.CUI as a partial in the ACA.cui and set which menus/toolbars/shortcut menus you want to see in the workspace and run from that. As always, when messing with cui files and such, back them up before changing stuff.