Experiences with building OMF applications Developing applications for the AEC Market using OMF By Gamal Kira, G.E.M. Team Solutions, Germany

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 site: www.team-solutions.de

When we use OMF?

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

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

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

Display System • Lots of opportunities • Flexible

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style Manager • We didn‘t use it yet, but it could be powerful (styles on the web etc...)

Things to consider when using OMF • Base class for entities is AecDbEntity (derived from AcDbCurve!) • Base class for objects is AecDbObject

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

Cons • New Release of AutoCAD, wait for OMF!

• Compared to ARX difference between releases (2 -> 3.0) are quite significant.

• help files could be more precise

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

Questions?