deos ny one know how to extract from CAD

[Shaun29]

I have been trying all week and my job depends on this!
my first time using cad vb6 I am trying to extract attributes from blocks and have them automatically be sent to a xls when drawing is saved.

 

[remeng]

Allot of CAD software can save this kind of information automatically. Have you checked the help files with CAD vb6? There should be a way to link the two.

 

[Shaun29]

yes what i came up with is this
SUB BOM()
write #1, (test.txt)
eol(1)
end
END SUB
NOW SCINCE MY DRAWING IS OPEN AND I NEED TO RUN THE CODE BEHIND THE DRAWING IM NOT SURE IF I NEED TO DECLARE ANYTHING OR GETATTRIBUTES IN AN IF STATEMENT AND I AM NOT SURE WHAT "WRITE #1 DOES AND IF THERE IS SOMTHING I AM MISSING TO ADD TO THE FILE WHEN I TRY TO RUN THIS CODE IT GOES TO EOL AND SAYS IT IS NOT DECLAREED. ALL I AM TRYING TO DO IS USE THIS BLOCK SO EVERY TIME I ADD NEW INFO IN MY BLOCK ATTRIBUTE IT AUTOMATICALLY LOADS THAT INFO TO THE SAME TEXT FILE AT THE EOND OF THE LAST LINE?

 

[PHV]

I AM NOT SURE WHAT "WRITE #1 DOES
First, please, don't shout.
Second, place the cursor inside the WRITE word in your code and press the F1 key.

 

[GVF]

PHV...Draftsmen always use upper case. It's a holdover from the days of pencils.
The following works in AutoCad:
You have to step through all the objects in modelspace and/or paperspace (and maybe multiple layouts) and check each object to see if it is a block. If it is a block, then set a variable to the block and check the block name. If it is "TitleBlock" or "BOM" (or whatever you need) then get the attributes from the block. If you are not sure of the block name then you might have to generate an error if the block does not have attributes and move to the next object. Once you have the attributes assigned to a variable you can step through each element of the variable and write the textstring property of each attribute to a text file. You might want to generate a comma delimited text file with the tagstring property as well. By the way, sometimes VBA for AutoCad insists on using multi-element variables instead of arrays. This is one of those times.
If you have multiple thousands of objects in your Cad file, it would be faster to use the SelectOnScreen function. It pauses the macro until a selection (or multiple selections) is made and the enter key is hit. That would allow you to select the specific block(s) you want the info pulled from.
It would be cleaner to just dump the data straight to Excel using VBA and bypass a text file.

As an aside you shouldn't feel too bad about loosing your job. After all, it used to be my job. That's why I know how to do this. Good Luck.

 

[Shaun29]

thanks finally got it to work i will post the code later job is secure. i just got to one of those tedious frustration points.