There must be an easier way!

Moving my blog

2009-11-21T15:14:00.002-05:00

I had decided to move my blog to davidkblackmon.com

This blog will stay up for a while, but all new post will be on the new site.

TIRADE (The IronRuby Autocad Development Environment)

2009-11-10T12:45:00.000-05:00

Here is a sneak-peek at TIRADE (don't get me started)

TIRADE stands for The IronRuby Autocad Development Environment.

TIRADE extends my work on acadhelper and allows instant (or at least very rapid) gratification and enjoyment of Ruby goodness when extending AutoCAD with IronRuby.

TIRADE runs modelessly, integrates RSpec and Test::Unit testing directly (slowly, but directly), has syntax highlighting and will soon have (hopeably) code completion for the acadhelper wrappers and methods.

I used the ICSharpCode TextEditor control (with some local modifications) as the editor control and used the open source DockPanel Suite that very closely matches the Visual Studio docking that we all know and love.

After a bit more testing, I hope to release TIRADE on the world. Stay tuned

Testing using IronRuby and Rspec in a Hosted Environment

2009-10-28T14:09:00.000-04:00

Using IronRuby, I have been working on some helpers and wrappers so I can use Ruby as a development language for AutoCAD. Things are going well with the project, but I needed some way to run Rspec tests. Since IronRuby is running in-process with AutoCAD, I could not just type

 
spec path/to/spec_file.rb -c -f nested

like one would when testing pure Ruby code. What I needed was a way to pass that command line string to an IronRuby engine that was running in the AutoCAD process. After a bit of digging and a bit of testing, I found that if I had a Ruby file consisting of

 
require 'rubygems'
$0="c:/ironruby-0.9.0/lib/IronRuby/gems/1.8/bin/spec"
ARGV << "acad_spec.rb" << "-c" << "-f" << "nested"
gem 'rspec', ">= 0"
load 'spec'

I could pass it to ir.exe and get the same result as running spec .... from the command line.

So I fired up my Visual Studio and came up with this. Right now, the Rspec options are hard-coded, but I plan to allow the tester to enter those options from the AutoCAD command-line.

When I netload this code into AutoCAD, I can browse to my Rspec file, pick it and run it. I used the AllocConsole from kernel32 so I could open a command console from AutoCAD and get the colored output that I blogged about earlier this week.

Also new in this code is the setting of the IronRuby search paths. I hard coded the basic search paths from ir.exe.config into a 'custom' xml file that can be edited separately from ir.exe.config. The config.xml file looks like this (blogger ate the xml tags so I used the gist). That link also has the simple Ruby files that the Rspec file uses.

The format of config.xml was mostly controlled by the fact the Ruby#CreateEngine#SetSearchPaths requires a ICollection and a linq query was the first method that popped into my head. (There is most probably a better/cleaner way so please let me know if you have one.)

Here is the simple spec file. And here is a screen shot of the console window output

This is just proof-of-concept stage right now, but I thought someone might be interested. If you are following along with the AutoCAD project, I will update the C# code there after I have done a bit more testing.

Next up, I plan to try to mock AutoCAD using flexmock.

Stay Tuned.

IronRuby and RSpec with color

2009-10-26T15:04:00.001-04:00

So I'm using Rspec to test some IronRuby code on my Vista box. I tried the --colour switch only to be told that I needed to install the win32console gem. No biggie right? I installed that gem and was told something about something about something, I don't even remember it all and can't find my notes now.

The thing that I do remember is that I still could not get color output from Rspec. So I did some googling (or is it googleing?) and found iron-term-ansicolor.rb in this github repo by hotgazpacho .

So I gave that a try. It worked well in ir, but still wouldn't work with Rspec. hotgazpacho was opening Kernel#puts but it appeared that I needed to open IO#write to get console.exe to show the colored output. ( I use console.ex e when I runs tests on my Vista box. It is great).

So, using the iron-term-ansicolor.rb code as a guide, I hacked together this code

require 'mscorlib'


## add the trailing m  because some of the rspec output spans multiple lines
ANSI_REGEXP = /\e\[(.+?)m(.+?)(?=(\e\[0m|\z))/m
SsC=System::ConsoleColor

class IO
alias_method :original_write, :write

def write(*args)
    count = 0
    args.each do |arg|

    fg_color = System::Console.ForegroundColor
    bg_color = System::Console.BackgroundColor

   ##dkb
    if ANSI_REGEXP.match(arg)
      data = extract_ansi_data(arg)
    else
      data = {:text => arg}
    end  

    System::Console.ForegroundColor = data[:foreground] || fg_color
    System::Console.BackgroundColor = data[:background] || bg_color
    count = original_write(data[:text])
    System::Console.BackgroundColor = bg_color
    System::Console.ForegroundColor = fg_color
  end
  count
end

private
def extract_ansi_data(arg)
  fg_color_map =    Hash[30,SsC.Black,31,SsC.Red,32,SsC.DarkGreen,33,SsC.DarkYellow,34,SsC.DarkBlue,35,SsC.DarkMagenta,
                 36,SsC.DarkCyan,37,SsC.Gray]
  bg_color_map = Hash[40,SsC.Black,41,SsC.DarkRed,42,SsC.DarkGreen,43,SsC.DarkYellow,44,SsC.DarkBlue,45,SsC.DarkMagenta,
                 46,SsC.DarkCyan,47,SsC.Gray]
  matches = ANSI_REGEXP.match(arg)
  fg_color = fg_color_map[matches[1].to_i] || System::Console.ForegroundColor
  bg_color = bg_color_map[matches[1].to_i] || System::Console.BackgroundColor
  { :foreground => fg_color, :background => bg_color,:text => matches[2]}
end

end

(Save this code somewhere in the IronRuby load path)

Then, I dove into the rspec code and in rspec-1.2.9\lib\spec\runner\options.rb I made this small change to the def colour= method (about line 191)


  ##comment out the line below
  #require 'Win32/Console/ANSI' ;\
  ## add this line
     require 'dkb-iron-term-ansicolor'  #or whatever you name the code above

With these 2 changes, I can use the -c option of Rspec to get the glorious green/red output when testing my IronRuby code. There may be a better, cleaner way, but I did a bit of searching and could not find it. This way seems to work, plus it gave me a good excuse to dig into the Rspec code.

Ruby on the AutoCAD Command line

2009-08-19T07:15:00.000-04:00

Using IronRuby, a bit of C# code and a great deal of aid from this post, I was able to create an interactive Ruby interpreter for the AutoCAD command line.

This part of my effort to bring some Ruby love to AutoCAD. The main part of my efforts can be found on github.

The code for the REPL is available there, so I won't post it here. But here is a little movie show Ruby and AutoCAD playing well together.

Ruby and AutoCAD via IronRuby

2009-08-17T14:19:00.000-04:00

Inspired by a blog post by Kean Walmsley here, I have been working on some wrapper and helper functions for driving AutoCAD using Ruby.

IronRuby and Kean's loader function gives the AutoCAD developer full access to the managed API. But any that has coded against that API knows it can be verbose and lead to some not-so-readable code, like the C# code below.

[CommandMethod("AddLine")]
public static void AddLine()
{
// Get the current document and database

  Document acDoc = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument;
Database acCurDb = acDoc.Database;

  // Start a transaction
using (Transaction acTrans = acCurDb.TransactionManager.StartTransaction())
{
 // Open the Block table for read
 BlockTable acBlkTbl;
 acBlkTbl = acTrans.GetObject(acCurDb.BlockTableId, OpenMode.ForRead) as BlockTable;

      // Open the Block table record Model space for write
 BlockTableRecord acBlkTblRec;
 acBlkTblRec = acTrans.GetObject(acBlkTbl[BlockTableRecord.ModelSpace],
                  OpenMode.ForWrite) as BlockTableRecord;

       // Create a line that starts at 5,5 and ends at 12,3
 Line acLine = new Line(new Point3d(5, 5, 0), new Point3d(12, 3, 0));

      acLine.SetDatabaseDefaults();

// Add the new object to the block table record and the transaction
 acBlkTblRec.AppendEntity(acLine);
 acTrans.AddNewlyCreatedDBObject(acLine, true);
 // Save the new object to the database
 acTrans.Commit();

}



In Ruby, using my AcadHelper module,that code becomes

def line_example
line = create_line [1,1], [2,4,5]
line.add_to_model_space
end

Add in a begin-rescue-end block and it still only 8 lines of, in my opinion, very readable code


def line_example
begin
  line = create_line [1,1], [2,4,5]
  line.add_to_model_space
rescue Exception => e
  puts_ex e
end
end

I hope Ruby catches on as development option for AutoCAD.
As a long-time AutoLISP hacker, I love having an interpreted language to use for development.
Ruby offers that, along with full access to the API and the beauty and power of Ruby

I have posted an initial verision of my AcadHelper.rb on github.
And development continues. I will be updated everything as time allows. I have added auto-loading
of functions, create_text and create_mtext functions, Editor.GetEntity helper,
an exception and backtrace print helper.

Next on the list is selection sets. If anyone wants to help out or has ideas, please let me know

First blog post

2009-05-24T11:55:00.001-04:00

This is my first post on my new blog, There must be an easier way!

It would seem that everyone except me has a blog these days.

Well world, your wait is over. Your suffering can cease. You will now have access to my every rant, rave, crazy idea and hare-brained scheme.

The entire web-connected world can now join my darling wife in her (heretofore lonely) enjoyment of the bountiful harvest that regularly spews forth from my over-fertile (and over-fertilized) mind.