We will start off with a confusing notion as to accessing the information. The application object, although closer to the root of the AutoCAD object tree, is a accessed through the document object. You might think, when working with an object tree structure, that you would start at the root of the tree. But that is not the case in VBA, and the reason makes sense when you step back and think about it for a minute. Because VBA applications run inside AutoCAD, with an open drawing, there is always a current drawing available. That drawing or document object is known as ThisDrawing to the VBA system. ThisDrawing is a library symbol in VBA.

To get to the application object, access the application property of the document object. This may seem repetitive because the words application and object are used twice, but they refer to two different things that happen to have the same name. One way to think about this is that the application property is just a pointer to another area in memory. The application object is what is stored in that area of memory. Remember that objects are containers of both data and procedures. The data elements are called properties when discussed in terms of objects.

  ThisDrawing.Application 'the application object