Generative Drafting

Creating a Front View in a new Drawing Document

This macro shows you how to create views in Drawing documents.

It retrieves a part document, creates a DrawingDocument and a front view of the part document.

CAADriCreateView is launched in CATIA [1]. No open document is needed.

CAADriCreateView.CATScript is located in the CAAScdDriUseCases module. Execute macro (Windows only).

CAADriCreateView includes four steps:

1. Prolog
2. Creating a New View in the Active Sheet
3. Set its Parameters to Make it a Generative Front View
4. Epilog

Prolog

  ...
    ' Open the Part document 
    Dim oPartToDraw As PartDocument
    Set oPartToDraw = CATIA.Documents.Open(sDocPath & _
             "\online\CAAScdDriUseCases\samples\Cube.CATPart")

    ' Create a drawing document: it becomes the active document.
    Dim oDrawing As DrawingDocument
    Set oDrawing = CATIA.Documents.Add("Drawing")
  ...

Open the part document to draw and create a new DrawingDocument. The part document is fetched in the documentation installation path, this path has already been stored in the sDocPath variable.

Creating a New View in the Active Sheet

  ...
  ' Retrieve the active sheet
    Dim oSheet As DrawingSheet
    Set oSheet = oDrawing.Sheets.ActiveSheet

    ' Create a view called "Front View" in this sheet
    Dim oFrontView As DrawingView
    Set oFrontView = oSheet.Views.Add("Front View")
  ...

The new DrawingView is created in the active DrawingSheet that is found on the DrawingSheets collection aggregated by the DrawingDocument object.

Set its Parameters to Make it a Generative Front View

...
    ' Retrieve it generative behavior
    Dim oFrontViewGB As DrawingViewGenerativeBehavior
    Set oFrontViewGB = oFrontView.GenerativeBehavior

    ' Declare the part to draw in this front view
    oFrontViewGB.Document = oPartToDraw

    ' Define this view as a front view, with the XY plane (in oPartToDraw) as projection plane 
    oFrontViewGB.DefineFrontView 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0

    ' Position the View in the Sheet
    oFrontView.x = 300
    oFrontView.y = 150
  ...

The generative behavior is provided by the DrawingViewGenerativeBehavior object aggregated by the DrawingView. We need to define the document to draw by valuating the Document attribute of the generative behavior. We then define which projection plane in this document will be used to draw the front view (here XY) and then the position of this view in its parent Sheet.

Epilog

...
   ' Update the view
    oFrontViewGB.Update 

Update the now completely defined generative behavior.