Introduction
Introduction
Overview of AutoCAD Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Interface
AutoCAD® ActiveX® enables you to manipulate AutoCAD programmatically from within or outside AutoCAD. It does this by exposing AutoCAD objects to the “outside world.” Once these objects are exposed, they can be accessed by many different programming languages and environments and by other applications such as Microsoft® Word VBA or Excel VBA.
There are two advantages to implementing an ActiveX interface for AutoCAD:
- Programmatic access to AutoCAD drawings is opened up to many more programming environments. Before ActiveX Automation, developers were limited to an AutoLISP® or C++ interface.
- Sharing data with other Windows® applications, such as Microsoft Excel and Word, is made dramatically easier.
An object is the main building block of any ActiveX application. Each exposed object represents a precise part of AutoCAD. There are many different types of objects in the AutoCAD ActiveX interface. For example:
- Graphical objects such as lines, arcs, text, and dimensions are objects.
- Style settings such as linetypes and dimension styles are objects.
- Organizational structures such as layers, groups, and blocks are objects.
- The drawing displays such as view and viewport are objects.
- Even the drawing and the AutoCAD application are considered objects.