A Better way than Nentsel to Select an Attribute

Hi,

I am writing a lisp routine that fills in a bunch of stuff on the border
with user entered information. I am actually editing blocks containing
attributes on the drawing. I have run into a problem using nentselpt;
initially the value of this atribute is "-" (without quotes) centered in a
box. Say the user runs my routine once and changes the attribute to
"_____1" (where the _ represents a space and there are no quotes). They
then realize this is wrong and re-run the routine. On the second time
through with the routine, my routine will crash because I have used
nentselpt to select the attribute to edit. Since there are spaces in the
new attribute, right where the nentselpt point is, nothing will be selected,
and my routine will crash. That is probably as clear as mud, but I was
wondering if there is a better way to select an attribute within a block for
editing in a lisp routine?

Thank you

 

I don't know why is nentselp necessary here. If you use nentsel to get the ename, then the object. the user should be able to update the string value anytime he wants.

 

I think it would be better to pick them by their tag values than their
locations. I would start with vla-getattributes and then filter for the tag
values you want. The following should get you started.

(setq enm (car (entsel "\nPick Block")); block ename
obj (vlax-ename->vla-object enm); block vla-object
var (vla-getattributes obj); vla-variant-array of block attributes
ary (vlax-variant-value var); safearray of block attributes
objlst (vlax-safearray->list ary); list of block attribute vla-objects
enmlst (mapcar 'vlax-vla-object->ename objlst); list of block
attribute enames
)

 

Incidentally, what does your routine do that the built-in editing commands
don't?

James