Controlling AutoCAd ion Client From Web

Does anyone have any experience of this:-

I want an AutoCAD user to be able to select information on a web site, then
select, or maybe place, a block in their AutoCAD drawing and update a few
attributes. I have no problem doing this in VB / VBA on the client PC, but
wondered the best method of achieveing this from a web page?

Can VBscript, or maybe JavaScript be used to access the AutoCAD object
model? As I have more VB / VBA experience would it be better / possible to
get the web script to call a program on the client that in turn accessed the
AutoCAd object Model, or maybe just get it to run a VBA module with
parameters

Is there another technique that I have overlooked?

--
Dave Preston
Technical Dev. Engineer
C A Design Services Limited
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Dave,

Do you manage the contents of the web page? If so, one approach would be to deploy a dll through the web page to each client machine. This dll would be your hook between the web page script - vbscript or javascript - and AutoCAD.

If you don't have control of the web page then we really need more information on what you need to accomplish.

Good Luck,

Scott

 

Do you happen to know of any simple examples of doing something like this?

I'm vaguely familiar with what you're suggesting, but do not know exactly
what the DLL would look like and exactly how this would be implemented.

Thanks for the post.

 

Sounds similar to i-drop.

 

PS. If you don't sign the control, every time you load the htm, you will get
a warning dialog. "Warning: this page contains a control that may not be
safe."

--
----
Ed
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pc, open acad 2004 (I used 2004 in this example, you can modify the source
and recompile or use late binding, your call).

here, the DLL is not Signed - in the real world you would sign the DLL as
secure. I don't want to sign this control with my companies name on it
because it should only be used for our use. So you will have to set your IE
security settings to allow or prompt to use unsigned activeX Controls for
this test. Don't worry, I'm not gonna format C: on you. You can look at
the source code to verify that there is nothing malicious in the DLL.

the control will add the new point to the first dwg in the documents
collection. I am using Javascript as the client-side scripting.

machines. If IE settings are to allow Signed controls it will be
transparent to the user. This is good for making updates to the dll and
redeploying it.

 

It would allow much greater control, though.

 

That will help tremendously. Thank you, very much.