When writing the previous post about a custom dialog for iProperty entry I had forgotten about another example I had put together a couple of years ago. This is similar but I think is better at demonstrating how useful this concept can be. In this case there’s a custom dialog that looks like a title block. This significantly simplifies filling out the title block. Instead of the user having to search through the iProperties dialog and remember which property corresponds to which field on the title block they just fill out the title block directly. For this example, one of the fields is also a prompted text entry to demonstrate that you’re not limited to only using iProperties. This sample doesn’t demonstrate it but it could also use drop-down fields with lists like that shown in the previous post.
When the program is run, this is what the user sees. It’s a VBA dialog that was created by doing a screen shot of the title block and inserting that as an image on the dialog. The various text controls were added on top of the image.
One the dialog is filled out and the “Apply” button is pressed it sets the corresponding iProperties and the prompted text and then the title block automatically updates to reflect those changes. Here’s the result.
Here’s a zip file containing a sample drawing that has the custom iProperties and the prompted text field the sample program expects and it contains a VBA project that contains the source code. If you want to implement this within your company I would recommend writing this as an add-in rather than VBA, like the previous post demonstrates.