Questions similar to this appear on the Be Community Forums. This problem appeared in the MicroStation Programming Forum.

Q  MicroStation's main window caption, by default, displays the current DGN file name and the active model. Sometimes you may want to change that default to something more meaningful to your colleagues.

• How do I set the DGN file title as MicroStation's main window title?
• How do I set the current project workspace name as MicroStation's main window title?
• How do I add the current model's dimension to MicroStation's main window title?

DGN File Events

The answers to those questions are solved by creating a VBA project that responds to DGN File Events. We provide a different implementation of subroutine hooks_OnDesignFileOpened that updates the Application.Caption each time the user opens a new DGN file …

Public Sub hooks_OnDesignFileOpened(ByVal fileName As String)
    Debug.Print "Opened design file " & fileName
End Sub

Design File Name and Model Name

A  Setting the DGN file as the Application.Caption is straightforward, since we have to do little more than copy the name to the caption …

Public Sub hooks_OnDesignFileOpened(ByVal fileName As String)
    Debug.Print "Opened design file " & fileName
    Application.Caption = fileName
End Sub

You may want to do a little more work than that. Perhaps you want just the file title displayed, rather than its full path …

Public Sub hooks_OnDesignFileOpened(ByVal fileName As String)
    Debug.Print "Opened design file " & fileName
    Application.Caption = ParseFileTitle (fileName)
End Sub

ParseFileTitle extracts the file title from the full path. The function is included in the SetMicroStationTitle project.

Project Name

A  Setting the workspace project name as the Application.Caption is also straightforward. In this case, expand the _USTN_USER or _USTN_PROJECT name …

Public Sub hooks_OnDesignFileOpened(ByVal fileName As String)
    Debug.Print "Opened design file " & fileName
    Dim projectName				As String
    projectName = ActiveWorkspace.ConfigurationVariableValue ("_USTN_PROJECT")
    Application.Caption = projectName
End Sub

Model Dimension

A  You obtain the dimension of a model using its Is3D property. You need to convert that boolean value to a string. Something like this …

Public Function ModelDimension(ByRef oModel As ModelReference) As String
    If (oModel.Is3D) Then
    	ModelDimension = "3D"
    Else
    	ModelDimension = "2D"
    EndIf
End Sub

Dim title As String
title = ActiveModelReference.Name & "is " & ModelDimension (ActiveModelReference)

Set MicroStation Title VBA Project

The functions above are included in the SetMicroStationTitle project. You can download this ZIP archive and extract SetMicroStationTitle.mvba to your Workspace\Standards\vba folder. Enter keyin vba run [SetMicroStationTitle]modMain.Main to load and initialise the project.