refedit and AutoLisp

[Frank Dux]

In the Refedit dialog there is a "settings" tab. There you can select "Lock objects not in working set." My question is, how can we specify this setting through lisp... because when using "-REFEDIT" in vlisp, the objects outside the working set do not get locked (unless you already used "REFEDIT" during the drawing session.) I scoured the internet and found several threads about this without any resolution... someone suggested changing the registry key for "LockObjects"... this only tells AutoCAD to remember if the "Lock objects not in working set" check box is checked or not in between REFEDIT dialogs, it does not alter the behavior of "-refedit" itself. This leads me to believe that there is some setting or flag that gets changed internally... I hope this question makes sense and that someone else has figured this out.

Thanks

[BlackBox]

In the Refedit dialog there is a "settings" tab. There you can select "Lock objects not in working set." My question is, how can we specify this setting through lisp... because when using "-REFEDIT" in vlisp, the objects outside the working set do not get locked (unless you already used "REFEDIT" during the drawing session.) I scoured the internet and found several threads about this without any resolution... someone suggested changing the registry key for "LockObjects"... this only tells AutoCAD to remember if the "Lock objects not in working set" check box is checked or not in between REFEDIT dialogs, it does not alter the behavior of "-refedit" itself. This leads me to believe that there is some setting or flag that gets changed internally... I hope this question makes sense and that someone else has figured this out.

FWIW -

Autodesk does not make it easy, if possible at all, to automate tasks that are dependent on their internal dialogs.

Having developed several .NET apps that also utilize registry for persistent setting storage, I can tell you that this data is rarely used for the real-time app functionality, and is instead used for initialization (i.e., storing to field, property, etc.), storing when changes are made, and prior to session termination.

That said, I'm not familiar with this particular setting/procedure, so please feel free to solve the riddle; just trying to manage expectations.

Cheers

[Gary.Orr]

In the Refedit dialog there is a "settings" tab. There you can select "Lock objects not in working set." My question is, how can we specify this setting through lisp... because when using "-REFEDIT" in vlisp, the objects outside the working set do not get locked (unless you already used "REFEDIT" during the drawing session.) I scoured the internet and found several threads about this without any resolution... someone suggested changing the registry key for "LockObjects"... this only tells AutoCAD to remember if the "Lock objects not in working set" check box is checked or not in between REFEDIT dialogs, it does not alter the behavior of "-refedit" itself. This leads me to believe that there is some setting or flag that gets changed internally... I hope this question makes sense and that someone else has figured this out.

Thanks

As BlackBox said... they haven't exposed that variable.
But, in another discussion group, someone ran into this same issue and I was able to work around the issue of functions grabbing those objects that should be locked out (including the references themselves) by:
Before entering the "-refedit" command grab a selection set of everything in the drawing.
enter "-refedit"...
when issuing whatever command on the objects (in the other post it was to copy the objects to the host drawing), grab whatever objects that you want to work on, using whatever selection method you're using, then switch to the "remove" option in the selection prompt and pass it the selection set that you aquired before entering the "-refedit" command.

(setq RemoveSet (ssget "X"))
(command "_-refedit" ... with your selection and whatever other options for the command
(command "_copy" ... or whatever command, using whatever selection method or selection set for what you want to work on then... "R" RemoveSet "" ... rest of command...

This method works around the issue regardless of the dialog box and it's associated variables having been initialized or not.

Hope it helps
-Gary