Topic: No Show Space

[Keith™]

Who ever said Se7en could spell? Heck just look at his name .... who in his right mind would spell like that?

[JohnK]

Alright, let's see which one of you two can spell "BAN" first?!

[TimSpangler]

Good lord, don't you guys go home at night?  I come in this morn to find a full thread.

CAB,  the code you posted works great along with Craks undo changes.  I am going to add the background color change (to show the user that he is in differant space) and I think this my be a wiener.

Thanks guys

Se7en,  I'll look into the CVS @ lunch today.  I agree that It's an invaluable resource.  I'll get back to you after to get more details.

 

[Keith™]

We never sleep....

[sinc]

I'm just curious - what exactly are you accomplishing that the Layer Walk doesn't already do?  Layer Walk only turns layers on and off, and unfreezes all layers, which is pretty annoying.  Is that why you're writing this new routine?

That's something else that had me curious - what do you mean by "no show" space?  "Off" layers and "Frozen" layers behave differently; often you very specifically want one, and not the other (unless you work like one of my coworkers, who inexplicably always freezes AND turns off any layer he doesn't want to see on the screen at that particular moment...).  I wouldn't think you'd want to lose this distinction, so I don't get this "No Show" space...

[TimSpangler]

Well i'll try to explain it better.

In CATIA there is what is know as "No Show Space".  This is like changing layout tabs (sort of) but it has the behavoir of turning a layer "Off".

It would be the place where entities go when they are turned off, thought in CATIA it isn't layer specific but entity specific.

What it allows is a "GUI", if you will, to select layers that have been turned off.  You can go into NoShow and see everything that is turned off, so you can select and entitiy to turn on instead of having to open the layer dialog and search through layer upon layer to turn one layer that you need.

For instance if you are working on a large project with 100+ layers and about 40 of them are turned off and you find that you need A-DOOR-EXST turned on you would just go to noshow and select an exsisting door and your done.

Here is the a completed version,  give it a whirl:

http://www.theswamp.org/lilly_pond/timspangler/NoShow.lsp?nossi=1

Here are links to bitmaps that I created for this program:

OffSpace:
http://www.theswamp.org/lilly_pond/timspangler/OffSpace.BMP?nossi=1

FrozenSpace:
http://www.theswamp.org/lilly_pond/timspangler/FrozenSpace.BMP?nossi=1

[Keith™]

Tim, I understand perfectly....
At my previous emplyer, we had a routine that would either turn off or freeze a layer when you selected an entity on that layer. Sometimes we needed to turn those layers back on, so...along with our "FreezePick" "OffPick" and "LockPick" we had "ThawPick" "OnPick" and "UnlockPick"
The ThawPick and OnPick were really cool in that it would temporarily toggle all layer visibility and allow the user to select an object that was off/frozen and then thaw and/or turn on that layer, along with the previous layers that were on and visible.

The NoShow Space concept can be easily described as "The layers that are not visible in the drawing window" and the operation of this program can be described as the ability to pick an object that is on a frozen or off layer and turn that layer on or thaw it.

[SMadsen]

Even I am beginning to understand.

Just having skimmed the code, my only suggestions are that the error handler restores the background color and that the *error* is made local.
Restoring could for example be

Code: [Select]


(defun *error* (msg)
...
  (if (and oldbckgrndclr (/= oldbckgrndclr (GET_BCKGND_COLOR)))
    (CHANGE_BKGRND OldBckGrndClr))
...
)

[V-Man]

Could this also work with layers that are thawed or frozen?