Open drawing read-only via command line

[RobertB]

... I have gone to developer support and I am told that it could be done with VB but I have never programmed in VB and I should retire in another few years. Thanks for the replies, Jack.

That's why I mentioned Publish. Visual LISP cannot continue to run in a new active document. It will only run in the context of the original document. However, as long as the newly opened document is not made active, you can use ActiveX from Visual LISP to affect that document. Most of the stuff you can do in VBA you can do in Visual LISP via ActiveX.

[3D Jack]

Thanks again Robert but I am not following what you are saying. I searched the VL help and I found 'VLA-ACTIVATE" but when I got to the description for it, that is written in VB which drives me crazy. If I am in VLisp I want VLisp help not VBA help. Here is what the help shows for vla-activate:

Sub Example_ActivateMethod()
    ' This example creates two new drawings and activates each drawing in turn.
    
    Dim NewDrawing1 As AcadDocument
    Dim Newdrawing2 As AcadDocument
    Set NewDrawing1 = ThisDrawing.Application.Documents.Add("")
    Set Newdrawing2 = ThisDrawing.Application.Documents.Add("")
    
    Dim drawing As AcadDocument
    For Each drawing In ThisDrawing.Application.Documents
        drawing.Activate
        MsgBox "Drawing " & drawing.name & " is active."
    Next drawing
End Sub

Unforunately the vast majority of my AutoLISP programming was from before VL came into being. I am not good with all of the VL commands and there are hundreds of them and there are no good books with samples to learn from. I recently purchased Jerry Winters book VB.NET Programming for Customizing AutoCAD. This will probably totally fry what few remaining activateable brain cells that I have left but I am going to risk it.

[irneb]

The vla-activate thing does work ... half-way. What I'd suggest is rather use a SCR file which loads your LSP then runs the code. To do this for multiple drawings use ScriptPro from AutoDesk website.

[3D Jack]

I will have to download scriptpro and see what it does. In trying to make this work I manually manipulated my script file so that it would open a drawing. After the drawing was opened I had it do a simple line command and draw a line. Even though the open drawing was at the front it drew the line on the empty drawing that has to be open in order to run scripts or whatever. If you have time, could you tell me what the advantage of scriptpro is or what I should be looking for? Thank you very much.

[irneb]

ScriptPro is basically an external program which opens AutoCAD with a particular DWG, then passes the lines in a SCR file to the command line through ActiveX. It's not a very involved thing - it mostly uses AutoCAD's own functionality. There's a few advantages to ScriptPro:

• You can perform the same SCR on as many DWG's as you like. It only opens 1 DWG at a time in a single ACAD session.
• Leave it "overnight" to run on a multitude of DWG's at the end it lists all commands performed and results from the text screen, so you can see if there were any errors.
• You can save a "Project" containing a specific SCR & set of DWG's so you can simply open that PRJ and run it again without having to reselect all the DWG's.
• It can run in the background and uses a separate AutoCAD session, so you can still perform other work (even in AutoCAD).
• Each SCR file is written only for a current DWG. You don't need to program for multiple DWG's (which makes Commands & Lisp much easier).

One nigly prob I've found is that it sometimes (not often, but it happens) doesn't load all the custom LSP / ARX / etc before starting the commands in the SCR ... so if you use these it shows an Unknown Command error. Way arround this is to include the LISP in the SCR or load it through a call to (load ...) or (arxload ...) in the SCR.

What you may not like is that it opens a new Session of AC for each DWG then closes after the SCR has finished.