CoCreate Modeling code examples

This section presents simple code examples which are (hopefully) useful in real life. Their main purpose, however, is to demonstrate and explain certain programming techniques.

• Color highlighting in the structure browser: Extend the structure browser with interrogators
• Alarm clock: Beep whenever a long-running command terminates: How to hook into events and run an external command to play arbitrary sounds
• Controlling model clipping planes: From a recorded command sequence to properly packaged Lisp code
• Using get_selection
• Automatically saving the model when CoCreate Modeling terminates
• Using symbol-function: How to hook into function calls - for advanced Lisp programmers
• Delete all parts matching a pattern: Scan assemblies and delete all parts matching a specified pattern
• Swap part colors: Change the color for any part which has a user-specified color
• List modified parts in a selection
• Simple directory browser: Bare-bones example of how to build your own graphical browser in CoCreate Modeling
• Enumerating all drives on a Windows system: Integrating Lisp and external commands (in this case, VBscript code) without exchanging data through temporary files
• Inquiring the Windows default printer (or all Windows printers): Two ways to solve the problem - an integration of Lisp and OSDD macro code, and a polyglot amalgam of Lisp and VBscript
• Secure a part from sectioning in Annotation views: How to develop a simple dialog based on sd-defdialog
• A platform-independent ls -l replacement
• List parts in Annotation views: Traverses viewsets and views in Annotation and lists the contents of view component lists
• Draw sine curves and archimedean spirals: How to build a spline command which draws curves on a workplane
• Hello, Excel!: How to send assembly data to Excel using DDE
• Solving the subset sum problem: A backtracking algorithm in Lisp, VBA and CoCreate Drafting macro language
• Exchanging text via the Windows clipboard (using .NET API functionality)

PS: The term "macro" sometimes shows up in URLs referring to the examples above, or when explaining Lisp code. This is mostly for historical reasons. See this blog entry for an explanation why "macro" is usually the wrong name, at least for code written for CoCreate Modeling.