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Pettersson15-Moonstone
15-Moonstone
January 4, 2022
Question

VBAPI cannot connect to symbol editing interface?

  • January 4, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 1787 views

I've got a rather large and complicated symbol to work on, and as we all know the interface to do this is horrible in Creo, with all text being overlaid on top of each other. So I had an idea: I'll draw my symbol in a hierarchical fashion, and then use Move Special to move all the notes to their correct positions! That actually worked ok, but it's still a lot of work to move all of the notes. Next brilliant idea: I'll use the VBAPI to connect to Creo with VBA from Excel and I'll have a table that just lists all the notes and their coordinates. Then I can work on my symbol in a nice, uncluttered environment and run the script to jam everything together before saving the symbol.

 

This worked less well. I can't seem to connect to Creo when it's in the symbol editing more. It works fine to connect when I'm in part or drawing mode, but I get an error when in symbol mode. I'm guessing it's because of the ever-open menu. Does anyone know a way around this? I just use a copy-pasted

 

 

asynconn.Connect("", "", ".", 5)

 

 

 ... when connecting. Maybe changing one of those variables could work? Or perhaps I'll have to connect while in the drawing and then go into symbol editing when connected. that seems more complicated, and I'm not even sure VBA can do it.

 

Any tips?

1 reply

M
MartinHanak24-Ruby III
24-Ruby III
January 5, 2022

Hi,

I do not have any suggestion concerning VBA ... please ask PTC Support.

My tips:

  • create several mapkeys for specific symbol variants
  • split complex symbol into several simplier ones

 

P
Pettersson15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
January 31, 2022

Thanks for your reply, Martin. Sorry I didn't get back. I pretty much brute-forced my symbol by moving everything manually using mapkeys. I think maybe it would have been possible to connect to the session while in normal drawing mode, then edit the symbol from there, and I tried this for a while, but kept running into difficulties. In the end I didn't have time to solve this, and just moved everything manually using a mapkey that unfortunately only saved me two clicks per note I needed to move.

Y
YaroslavSin17-Peridot
17-Peridot
February 1, 2022

I think, you can modify entities (move notes) in symbol definition directly.

Take a look at the documentation chapter "Detail Symbol Definitions"

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