Routines (alphabetical) > Object Classes > File Format Object Classes > IDLffDXF

# IDLffDXF

Superclasses | Creation | Properties | Methods | Version History

An IDLffDXF object contains geometry, connectivity and attributes for graphics primitives.

Note: IDL supports version 2.003 of the DXF Library.

Note: See IDL Feature Support for a list of platforms that support DXF functionality.

This object treats a DXF file as a list of entities. Note, these are not directly mapped to DXF entity types, rather they are an abstraction of the DXF types. The Read method is used to read the contents of a DXF file into the current entity list. The user may then query this list using the GetContents method to determine the types and number of entities in the file. The user may retrieve arrays of entities from the list using the GetEntity method and add additional entities using the PutEntity method. Entities can also be removed from the list (RemoveEntity) or the entire list destroyed (Reset). The current list of entities can also be written to disk as a DXF file. Note, this object converts DXF entities to IDL entities and back. This conversion is not reversible; thus, if a DXF file is read and then written, the data in the file is not changed, but the internal DXF entity types may be changed by IDL. As an example, DXF face3d entities may be written as DXF polyline entities.

The object has one attribute which can be modified using the Get/SetPalette methods. This palette is used to convert color index values. The palette is not actually written to the DXF file. So, if the user wanted to specify entity colors from a 256 entry table, that table would be set using SetPalette, but the actual colors written to the file are the closest colors matched to the fixed AutoCAD color palette. There are two special color values: (0) = color by block color, (256) = color by layer color.

In this object, blocks and layers are treated as named entities with attributes, but are special in that all other entities have a block and layer entity reference in them. This allows the user to use these entity names as filters for many operations. There is a default block and a default layer. The default block has the name “” (empty string), and the default layer is '0'. The user may change the (non-name) attributes for these implicit blocks using PutEntity.

## Superclasses

None

## Creation

See IDLffDXF::Init.

## Properties

Objects of this class have no properties of their own.

## Methods

This class has the following methods:

- IDLffDXF::Cleanup
- IDLffDXF::GetContents
- IDLffDXF::GetEntity
- IDLffDXF::GetPalette
- IDLffDXF::Init
- IDLffDXF::PutEntity
- IDLffDXF::Read
- IDLffDXF::RemoveEntity
- IDLffDXF::Reset
- IDLffDXF::SetPalette
- IDLffDXF::Write

## Version History

5.2 | Introduced