activate drawing after open

I am writing a lisp routine that opens a drawing file. It opens fine. However, if I have other drawings open, whatever drawing that is open at the time I run the lisp routine remains the active drawing.

I have the following problems:

1) I need to activate the drawing I just opened
2) When I activate the drawing, it loses contact with the lisp routine that was running and basically "breaks".

I have gone through the archives and have tried various code snippets, but so far nothing works. I am in AutoCAD 2005 and it looks like vla-activate is no longer available to me (at least it isn't listed in help). The vb statements don't seem to work because of the dwg switch.

Help?

Elise Moss
www.mossdesigns.com

 

Do you really need to have other drawings open? What about setting SDI to 1 and lispinit to 0? Then you could open drawing after drawing with your lisp (but only one at a time) and it will not quit on you.

Hope this helps.

 

I don't want to annoy my users by making them close all their files simply to plot a drawing package.

My other option would be to use a VB program to "supervise" the entire transaction.

 

Because LISP programs are part of each document they're
run in, a LISP program cannot operate in the manner you
describe (change the active document and continue to run).

When a document in which a LISP program is running is
deactivated, the running LISP program in that document
becomes suspended until the document is active again.

To do this sort of thing, you must use VBA.

 

I can understand that. Thought I would make the suggestion anyway (I'm still quite the novice). Hopefully some others will chime in with ideas.

 

You can use this function:

Code:

(defun active-dwg	(fName / docs)
(vlax-for doc	 (vla-get-documents (vlax-get-acad-object))
(setq docs (cons doc docs)))
(not
(vl-catch-all-error-p
(vl-catch-all-apply
'vla-put-activeDocument
(list
(vlax-get-acad-object)
(vl-some
(function (lambda (item)
(if (eq (vla-get-fullName item) fName)
item)))
docs))))))

 

What I do:
Have the Lisp output a script, and at end,
run that script.
(assuming SDI 0)
Script needs to look like:
QSAVE
CLOSE
OPEN
FILE-TO-PLOT
(LOAD "PLOTME")
CLOSE
OPEN
FILE-TO-PLOT
(LOAD "PLOTME")
.....ETC


Bob