Experiences with building OMF applications

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Experiences with building OMF applications

• Developing applications for the AEC Market using
  OMF

By Gamal Kira, G.E.M. Team Solutions, Germany
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G.E.M. Team Solutions

• Custom development for the AEC Market
• More than 10 years experience in CAD/AEC
  development
• Part of the ADT development team since 1996 (ADT
  1.0)
• More information on web sitewww.team-solutions.d
  e

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When we use OMF?

• Applications for AEC to work with ADT
• Applications for plain AutoCAD
• Experienced C developers who are new to AutoCAD

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Resource Manager

• Easy to support multiple languages
• Easy switching languages (registry setting)

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UI and other Tools

• Registry mechanisms
• Layerkeying
• Prompts, Editboxes (Distance, Angle, etc...)
• Possible to add property pages to existing
  property sheets
• Units
• AecGeCompCurve2d, AecGeProfile
• Aec...
• Streams

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Display System

• Lots of opportunities
• Flexible

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Custom Formwork Application

• Paschal GmbH (www.paschal.de) needed an
  application for complex formwork planning
• We suggested using ADT
• Project started in Summer 2000
• Mr. G. Schmitt (Paschal) is the Product Designer

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Design Center

• AEC Content (commands, ...)
• Preview window (view dependant)

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AEC Modeller

• Fast facetted modeller
• Used for pour object and in UI

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Anchors

• Special relationship between objects
• Basically designed for location anchors, but can
  be used for more
• Owner/Ownee relationship has special behaviour in
  copy delete
• ... demo

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Relationship Graph

• AcDbObjectReactor derived class
• Tracks (AEC) relationships within drawings
• Some useful utilities can be used here-gt
  getObjectsOfType

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GEM Doctor

• Tool we developed along with our projects to see
  whats going on during an AutoCAD/ADT session
• Pre-Release is available as a free evaluation
  version on our web site
• ... demo

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Style Manager

• We didnt use it yet, but it could be powerful
  (styles on the web etc...)

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Things to consider when using OMF

• Base class for entities is AecDbEntity (derived
  from AcDbCurve!)
• Base class for objects is AecDbObject

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Pros

• Feature changes for free
• Dialog pinning
• AEC Feature changes
• New utilities
• Resource Manager
• Streams
• Anchors
• Cloning etc. is taken care of

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Cons

• New Release of AutoCAD, wait for OMF!
• Compared to ARX difference between releases (2 -gt
  3.0) are quite significant.
• help files could be more precise

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Résumé

• For us, OMF was just the tool we needed to
  develop applications

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Questions?