Application Object

See Also

UseCases

Represents the current CNext application and its frame window.

CATIA products. The root object is the Application, which aggregates, or includes, Documents, a Document collection, and Windows, a Window collection. A collection is an object that gathers objects of the same type and is denoted as a plural name. Documents gathers Document objects and provides methods for managing individual documents in the collection.The documents belong to one of the four types, that is the PartDocument, the ProductDocument, the DrawingDocument and the AnalysisDocument. Windows gathers Window objects, and provides methods for managing individual windows in the collection.

In addition to this functional view, we can superimpose another view to help understand some basic mechanisms:

All objects, and not only those shown in this diagram, except collections, derive from the AnyObject abstract object which supplies the Application, Name, and Parent properties. You can then use these properties and this method against any object, since any object features them. All collections derive from the Collection abstract object which supplies in addition the Count property.

The Application property returns the application to which an object belongs. When running in-process macros, there is only one application named CATIA. The Name property allows any object to be assigned a name. The Parent property allows the parent object to be retrieved, the parent object being the object which aggregates the current one. The Count property of the Collection object returns the number of items in the collection. In addition, a Collection object can supply an Item, an Add, and a Remove method.

The root object for all CATIA macros is Application . This corresponds to the CATIA frame window. The CATIA application is always named CATIA for in-process access, and you should only refer to it since it already exists when you run an in-process macro. The application aggregates, or includes, a document collection accessed using the Documents property, and a >window collection accessed using the Windows property. The document collection stores the currently opened documents and the window collection stores the currently opened windows for these documents. The active document is the document opened in the active window, that is the window in which the end-user is currently working. They are accessed using the ActiveDocument and the ActiveWindow properties respectively.

The Application object has other properties, such as FileSearchOrder which allows a pathname concatenation searched for when opening files to be set or retrieved. As the application represents the frame window, you can set the frame dimensions and location using the properties Width, Height, Left and Top respectively, with values expressed in screen pixels.

The Application object aggregates also a SystemService object which provides for example the Environ method to get the value of a given environment variable.

[Top]