Using standard AutoCAD dialogs to select colors, linetypes and lineweights with .NET

AutoCAD has a number of handy dialogs available in the "Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows" namespace. The following code shows how to use three, in particular: ColorDialog, LinetypeDialog and LineWeightDialog. These three classes allow you to very easily implement user-interfaces selecting their corresponding properties.

Here's the C# code:

using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime;

using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices;

using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices;

using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput;

using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows;

namespace AutoCADDialogs

{

  public class Commands

  {

    [CommandMethod("CDL")]

    public void ShowColorDialog()

    {

      Document doc =

        Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument;

      Database db = doc.Database;

      Editor ed = doc.Editor;

      ColorDialog cd = new ColorDialog();

      System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult dr =

        cd.ShowDialog();

      if (dr == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)

      {

        ed.WriteMessage(

          "\nColor selected: " +

          cd.Color.ToString()

        );

      }

    }

    [CommandMethod("LTDL")]

    public void ShowLinetypeDialog()

    {

      Document doc =

        Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument;

      Database db = doc.Database;

      Editor ed = doc.Editor;

      LinetypeDialog ltd = new LinetypeDialog();

      System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult dr =

        ltd.ShowDialog();

      if (dr == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)

      {

        ed.WriteMessage(

          "\nLinetype selected: " +

          ltd.Linetype.ToString()

        );

      }

    }

    [CommandMethod("LWDL")]

    public void ShowLineWeightDialog()

    {

      Document doc =

        Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument;

      Database db = doc.Database;

      Editor ed = doc.Editor;

      LineWeightDialog lwd = new LineWeightDialog();

      System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult dr =

        lwd.ShowDialog();

      if (dr == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)

      {

        ed.WriteMessage(

          "\nLineweight selected: " +

          lwd.LineWeight.ToString()

        );

      }

    }

  }

}

When we run the CDL command, we have three tabs available:

Here's the dialog shown by the LTDL command:

And the LWDL command:

And here is the command-line output for selecting each of the above items:

Command: CDL

Color selected: 91

Command: CDL

Color selected: 56,166,199

Command: CDL

Color selected: DIC 266

Command: LTDL

Linetype selected: (2130316464)

Command: LWDL

Lineweight selected: LineWeight009

In the next post we'll look at at how to use these dialogs in a more realistic way.

Comments

[Fernando Malard]

Hi Kean,

Can be these dialogs called from ObjectARX C++ API?

[Kean]

Hi Fernando,

The following colour-related functions are in the ObjectARX SDK, in aced.h:

acedSetColorDialog()
acedSetColorDialogTrueColor()
acedSetColorDialogTrueColorWithCallback()

The linetype and lineweight dialogs are not officially exposed via ObjectARX, but they are exported off acad.exe as:

acedLinetypeDialog()
acedLineWeightDialog()

If you're skilled with function de-decorating/unmangling, then you should be able to work out how to call them from the dumpbin output. This isn't supported, however.

Oh, and you can certainly invoke the managed versions from C++, although I haven't done so myself.

Cheers,

Kean

[Martin Duke]

Hello Kean,

These controls are great, but what I would really like, are Combobox versions of them as that is more appropriate on a form. I know ActiveX versions are available, but, from my experience they are not overly reliable in a .NET environment. Maybe you could show how to create Colour\Linetpye controls as Combos in .NET?

Cheers

Martin.

[Kean]

Hi Martin,

As you've mentioned, combobox versions of the AutoCAD controls (layer, linetype, lineweight, layer, UCS) as well as additional ActiveX controls for other types of content (DWG thumbnail, hatch-pattern, slide) are available for ADN members from here.

The effort to re-create these in .NET would be non-trivial: if you have any feedback on using them from a .NET environment, please let us know via the ADN site, and we'll do our best to fix them.

Regards,

Kean

[Mark]

Excellent example, thank you.
I am implementing these dialogs in a Layer Standards dialog (VB.NET) and have managed to pass a color to the color dialog and return user selected. (using color convertor)
However, with the linetype dialog (as with your example) the string returned is in an user-unfriendly format. I am assuming that it is possible to look at the linetype table record to get a description or like, but there does not seem to be an easy way to accomplish this.

[Kean]

It's an ObjectID: if you use it inside a transaction to get the LinetypeTableRecord (by calling GetObject()), you can then access a more friendly identifier by the Name property.

Kean

[coddy]

Hi Kean,

This question is not related to the above mentioned topic. I would like to know if it's possible to view sld files as thumbnails in listview control using C#. If not, what is the other method? Hope you will help me out.

Thanks