MenuGroups in Zero Document State

Is there a way to kill ACAD's default menu for zero document state and
replace it with my own menugroup via VBA (or whatever)?

Regards,
Maksim Sestic

 

No. The programming environments are associated with the drawings. Thus when
there are no drawings loaded, there is no way to do any customization. The
0doc menu, is hard coded and is not accessible for customization.

 

That's what I expected. Anyway, I'm grabbing the BeginClose event of a
document last being closed (application.documents.count = 1), ask if user
wants to save data and then launch a dialog with my predefined set of
options.

Thanks,
Maksim Sestic

 

Do as you may, but I don't regard that as acceptable behavior.

If I have two or more documents open, and none of them
have been modified, then when I click on the "X" button
on the AutoCAD main window to close the application, I
want AutoCAD to close.... period... no questions asked.

 

Here's how it goes: I have my own project management system, but users
doesn't have to use it (they may work with single drawings as they do in
plain ACAD). This is one problem. The other is that I had to rewrite
majority of menu UI as there's no ACAD localization for my native language.
And then, imagine one non-english speaking user close the only active
drawing and see unrecognizable zero-document-state menu ("File, Window,
Help...").

On the other hand, what I do is initially launching ACAD through an EXE file
that asks the user if he/she wants to "Open new drawing", "Open new
project", etc. just before ACAD main window pops up (it's there, but it's
invisible). Then the EXE calls my DVB macros, depending on users choice, and
kills itself. I wanted to implement the same startup dialog in zero-document
state. As there's no EndClose event for the document object, I'm done with
my zero-doc-state approach (alas). One of the solutions was to shut down the
ACAD as user closes the last active drawing, which is overkill to me. The
other valid solution is to let the EXE running through the complete
life-cycle of ACAD session and deal with zero-doc state for itself...
killing itself when the connection to the server is lost (ACAD shut down or
some standard fatal error occured).

This is what bothers me lately, but, thanks to this group therapy - I'm
feeling better now

Regards,
Maksim Sestic

 

Believe it or not, I localized complete Autodesk Land Development Desktop R2
via ResHacker (the market I'm developing sw for seems too uninteresting for
Autodesk). Then Autodesk released a new version of LDD and I felt sick for a
month The applications I'm writing now have one thing in common - they
do not interfere with original Autodesk platform settings/resources. My EXE
launches ACAD and generates necessary profiles, menus, toolbars, etc. When
it gets shut down it cleans up everything behind, and when the user runs
standard ACAD (say, via Desktop shortcut) - he sees just what he sees when
there was no my application installed onto the computer. The only viable
solution is to develop my own ResHacker (which I tried, to be honest) that
will do resource hacking when my EXE gets started.

Regards,
Maksim Sestic

 

If you want to localize on the fly (at least menu labels),
you can do that without altering resources. You just modify
the loaded menus on the fly by using Windows API functions
(see SetMenuItemInfo(), GetMenu(), etc.).

 

Good tip, I'll try to implement suggested API calls with little help of
Spy++ application from VisualStudio...