ACA-AMEP: Edit Property Data Via AutoLISP, Part 1

Sometimes you need to make changes to the values of a Property on all or many AEC Objects in a file. If that change can be done programatically (example, in a text-type manual Property, edit the text value, replacing all occurrences of "1ST" with "2ND"), and there are a large number of Objects to process, it may be easier to do so via AutoLISP, than to manually edit each value. This series of articles will show you how to do so.

NOTE: I have only used this technique on manual Properties. I am not certain what would happen if you tried to use this to change the value of an automatic property. I suspect the change may fail, at least in some cases, like formula Properies. Even if it works for some automatic Properties, such as the height or width of a Door, doing so may have unexpected results in the drawing. If you have a use case for trying to edit the values of automatic Properties, please test this thoroughly on copies of files, or files created strictly for testing purposes, not on actual project files, until you are certain there is no harm.

The VisualLISP commands will be used to access the object model. You will also need to operate on vla-objects. If your method of getting the selection set on which to operate results in AutoLISP entity names, these can be converted to vla-objects by using the
(setq obj (vlax-ename->vla-object ename))
function, where obj is the name of a variable holding the vla-object and ename is the name of a variable holding the entity name of the object on which you want to operate.

Getting to the Property value is not a matter of simply querying the object for it. You will need to drill down into the object model. Start with the following code. You can use different variable names if the ones used in the example code here do not conform to your naming standard. Just make certain you substitute your names consistently.

(vl-load-com)
(setq objAcad    (vlax-get-acad-object)  ; AutoCAD Application Object.
      objAecSchd (vla-GetInterfaceObject objAcad (strcat "AecX.AecScheduleApplication" (aecappver)))
                                         ; AecScheduleApplication object.
      oPSets     (vlax-invoke-method objAecSchd 'PropertySets obj)
                                         ; Get PropertySets collection object.
      iPSets     (vlax-get-property oPSets 'Count)
                                         ; Get number of Property Sets in the PropertySets collection object.
      iPSet  0                           ; Initialize Property Set counter.
) ;_ End setq.

Here is what is happening in that code:

• The (vl-load-com) function loads the VisualLISP functions, if they are not already loaded. If they are loaded, it does nothing.
• The first item in the setq function gets the AutoCAD object. This is then used to get the AEC Schedule Application object. This object is version-specific, so I use a subroutine I put together to return the version string, called AECAPPVER. You can find the code for that routine in this previous article. The article was updated to support versions through 2020.
• The third item in the setq function uses the PropertySets method of the AEC Schedule Application object to get the PropertySets collection for the object on which we want to operate (which is held in the obj variable).
• The final two items in the setq function determine the number of Property Sets that are in that collection, and initializes a Property Set counter to 0, which is the index of the first Property Set in the collection.

Next article in the series.