Introduction

The MicroStation Development Library (MDL) and MicroStationAPI provide APIs for developers wanting to create custom applications for MicroStation^® from Bentley Systems. We create a MicroStation application as a DLL, written using C++ and built with the Microsoft C++ compiler and linker provided with Visual Studio.

When editing your source code, you can choose whether to use Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, or one of your favourite text editors.

When building your app, you can use Visual Studio or the Bentley Systems make (bmake) tools.

SDK ModifyText Example

The MicroStation SDK delivers ..\examples\Annotation\ModifyTextTool. That example is idiosyncratic in its operation, and doesn't deliver what one expects.

What ..\examples\Annotation\ModifyTextTool actually does is to provide a locate tool that lets you pick a text element. Once picked, the AddIn copies the text, modifies it, then lets you place the new text in the active DGN model. The original text element is left unchanged. So the tool doesn't modify anything, but instead creates new text.

Replace Text Question

The above peculiar behaviour puzzled at least one person who posted a question to the MicroStation Programming Forum. How do we write a tool that lets one pick a text element, then replace its contents in situ?

ReplaceText Example

We wrote an extended version of the SDK example. It adds some commands to replace text, and some tool classes to implement those new commands.

The commands in the ReplaceText example are …

ReplaceText Example Commands

Key-In	Command Class	Comment
CHANGETEXT HELP VERSION		Shows the DLL version number
CHANGETEXT COPY CASE LOWER	ChangeCaseToolLower	Same as SDK ModifyText example
CHANGETEXT COPY CASE UPPER	ChangeCaseToolUpper	Same as SDK ModifyText example
CHANGETEXT COPY TEXT	ChangeTextTool
CHANGETEXT REPLACE CASE LOWER	ReplaceCaseLowerTool	Changes original text element
CHANGETEXT REPLACE CASE UPPER	ReplaceCaseUpperTool	Changes original text element
CHANGETEXT REPLACE TEXT new text	ReplaceTextTool	Changes original text element

The commands new to ReplaceText example are those that replace the existing text in a text element. There's also CHANGETEXT HELP VERSION, which is described below.

The new tool classes that replace text are simpler than those in ModifyTextExample. User starts the command, picks a text element, and the element's content is changed and the element updated. The text content is handled with a TextBlock, and the example shows how to extract and update the text in a TextBlock.

Windows Version

Read this article that show to embed a Windows resource into your MicroStation AddIn.

Download the Updated ReplaceText Example

The above code is available in this C++ project. Unpack the ZIP archive and copy the source code to a suitable location.

Questions

Post questions about C++ and the MicroStationAPI to the MicroStation Programming Forum.

Return to MicroStationAPI articles index.