VBA and Startup Suite

[mboyer]

I am trying to find out how to populate a startup suite with VBA. Any Ideas?

The purpose of this is to add to a slew of VBA steps that will automatically setup Autocad w/ correct support paths, menus, pc3 path, palette, etc.

[Ed Jobe]

Create a new project and save it as acad.dvb. In a public module, create a public sub called AcadStartup. Add you setup to this method and it will run at startup. An alternate method would be to use profiles. Create a profile with the correct settings in Options. Change the shorcut used to start acad by adding the /p startup switch followed by the profile name in double quotes. The name is case sensitive. You can save the profile to an arg file and share it with other users.

[mboyer]

That's cool that you can edit the shortcut to activate.

I've done sort of what you're saying w/ the acad.dvb. The issue though is that I need to place a few .lsp files in the Startup Suite in the APPLOAD dialogue. Is there a way in VBA to populate that startup suite?

Marc

[Ed Jobe]

You shouldn't need to use the startup suite. Use acad.lsp for running the lisp files at startup. If you make a partial menu for your custom code, you can also use your menu's mnl file to load lisp and your other dvb's.

[Opie]

That's cool that you can edit the shortcut to activate.

I've done sort of what you're saying w/ the acad.dvb. The issue though is that I need to place a few .lsp files in the Startup Suite in the APPLOAD dialogue. Is there a way in VBA to populate that startup suite?

Marc

Depending on your needs, you could use the ACAD.LSP or ACADDOC.LSP files. These are user created files. These files will be executed by AutoCAD upon start up or opening a drawing.

If you have more than one each of these two files, the first ones found will be the ones that are loaded.

They do not add anything to the Startup Suite, as far as I know.

[mboyer]

I am familiar w/ the acaddoc.lsp. That makes sense. If I add the lsp info into this file, it will be loaded automatically just like the startup suite would do.

[Ed Jobe]

acaddoc is simiar to acad.lsp, except that it runs everytime you open a file. acad.lsp only runs once when the app is first started, just like the startup suite would do. This is the one you want for doing setup work.

[mboyer]

Let me ask you this then. I had setup a bunch of variable settings to occur through vba. In the ACADDOC.lsp, a routine automatically ran the macro.

I ran into issues when people were batch plotting to dwf and it only occured when I had this set up. If I placed the same routine in the ACAD.lsp, would that eliminate the plotting issue since it would only run at startup?

[Ed Jobe]

You didn't say what "issues", but I would say, "yes". Give it a try.

[mboyer]

Here's one of the major issues I was having.
When doing a batch plot of several files using the Publish command, we'd get an error message at about the 3rd file the batch came across. At first I thought maybe it was the file, but after checking it throughly, I found nothing wrong w/ it. When I removed the program in the Acaddoc.lsp, the error went away.