As we drill down into the object tree of AutoCAD, we will present an abridged list of the methods and properties for each of the primary objects. It is not feasible to list them all in this book, as the list is extensive and is still being appended with future releases of VBA. A complete list is available in the online help system for AutoCAD VBA, and we strongly recommend exploring that tool further to learn more or to search for a specific item of interest to your application. The names of the objects in the tables will help in locating more related objects. We will focus on the objects that are most commonly employed in application development based on our experiences in developing programs for a wide variety of clients.

We are now going to explore the AutoCAD object tree (refer to figure 4.1) in the following order. Starting with the application object, we will quickly move down to the active document object. The next step is into the utility object, where a library of very useful functions can be found. Also within the document objects are the collection objects. The collection objects contain all the tables for the drawing, such as the layer and block tables. Chapter 5 explores collections in more detail: this chapter exposes only the basic operations of collections. Within collections are the entity objects, and they are explored next in the chain. After looking at some specific entity...