We mostly make 3D drawings for visualization, and to import some 3D models from Revit®. Of course, BricsCAD has its own parametric system that works in 3D too, do you have no use for that? Martin: We can use them, we can view them but we can’t make them. Sometimes we have electrical drawings where the symbols have been done with dynamic blocks and I hate them. It’s good that we can work with them, but we don’t need to make them. I can see why you need them in architectural drawing but in electrical planning they make no sense. Martin: We’re not really missing anything. Most stuff I write is company-specific and sometimes project-specific. Martin: Yes, I missed ATTSYNC for a long time! It’s now been added to BricsCAD but at one stage I had to add it myself. Martin: Yes, but we use the support which is great, and fast.Īs part of your development, do you have to add things that are missing in BricsCAD that would be there in AutoCAD®? Have you had any problems with bugs using the APIs?
NET developer, but I just use it for a couple of things I need. Now of course, BLADE makes development possible and easy.
Not very often, but if something is amiss in the drawing we can cheat and edit the text file! Developmentīefore using BricsCAD, what software were you using?īricsCAD was an alternative with a good LISP engine, and now it’s a very fast LISP engine too. But we stayed with the text file because it’s hackable. ObjectDBX would have been possible, I think. We thought about connecting that application directly to BricsCAD. We’re creating a special kind of text file which is read by another application. Martin: Mostly, it’s attribute extraction.
So you write some pretty complicated stuff. I added a switch called PANIC! If it went wrong, the user pressed that button and the focus was corrected. Martin: There was a problem with losing focus on some modeless dialog boxes. There’s DCL support of course, but OpenDCL is easier to program and maintain so it was very important for us. Martin: Yes, because no OpenDCL would have been a show-stopper for us.
So making a free open-source piece of third-party software work with BricsCAD took a couple of months to sort out? Martin: From one sub-version to the other. We had some problems at the start but the support fixed it. Or freezing layers in viewports – I wrote a function in C# which is faster, but not much.įor some user interface things we use OpenDCL, which has worked perfectly since about V10. For example, converting text from Sk Unicode and back. Sometimes it’s easier in C# but that’s not often the case. That’s not very often, because the LISP engine is very fast. Martin: Lots of LISP code! For some functions, we use. Tell me about the ways in which you customize BricsCAD. In this part I ask about the company’s custom environment and use of APIs before moving on to dynamic blocks and interchange of 3D components with Revit®. In this post I continue the interview with CAD guy Martin Harrer and IT guy Germar Tischler from Austrian fire alarm, security and communications systems company Schrack Seconet.