Project: My company wishes to standardize layers in AutoCAD. We wish to develop a layer guideline, similar to the AIA Layering Standards, and make it easy for our users to stick to it. During discussion with the bosses and I, an idea was developed to duplicate the "Linetype Manager" but to show a list of lines you can pick from, and hit a button that would create all the selected layers into your drawing. The goal is to create a dialog that mimics the Linetype Manager, but has a list of layers, listing their Name, Color, Linetype properties, and allows a user to select/highlight multiple layers, and hit a "CREATE" button that will then create all the layers inside the current drawing. I figure that for 95% of our layers, I can have them on a list, and there would be a rare case where someone has to create a new layer for a very job-specific situation.
My thought it to mimic the linetype manager almost directly. I figure that I would create a text file with a layer definition on each line. The dialog would read the contents of this file automatically, spit out the content in the form shown on the dialog, all in a manner which allows a user to pick from that list. Then the button fires a loop that'll initiate the layer creation command for each layer definition.
That's my thought anyways, for how to skin this cat.
Am I going about this properly? Should this be reasonably feasible? Is there a better way to skin this cat?
I've seen many routines on the swamp in various languages that allow a user to do this... do you have an external file with layers defined, for easy updating/maintanence/revision, or is it hardcoded into your routines, and you just take it upon yourself to edit the routine/program every time you have to add a layer?