Background Information

It is often necessary to make major changes in the settings in VBA levels. For example, running in batch mode.

Many of the potential level attributes such as color, line width, line style, etc. are designed as direct properties available in the VBA object model settings, while others you can change as a VBA wrapper from the MDL add functions.

Transparency, which can be changed as a property in the Layer Manager, can be given a value between 0 and 100.

Steps

To change the transparency settings of levels, a VBA wrapper function is needed. The V8 "MDL Function Reference" states the following:

    VBA Wrapper Declaration

Declare Function mdlLevel_setTransparency Lib "stdmdlbltin.dll" (ByVal modelRefln As Long, ByVal levelldln As Long, ByVal transparencyIn As Double) As Long

If you want to apply this declaration into a VBA routine, it might look like the following:

Declare Function mdlLevel_getTransparency Lib "stdmdlbltin.dll" (ByRef transparencyOut As Double, ByVal modelRefIn As Long, ByVal levelIdIn As Long) As Long
Declare Function mdlLevel_setTransparency Lib "stdmdlbltin.dll" (ByVal modelRefIn As Long, ByVal levelIdIn As Long, ByVal transparencyIn As Double) As Long
 
Sub levelTransparency()
Dim oLv As Level
For Each oLv In ActiveDesignFile.Levels
    If Not oLv.IsFromLevelLibrary Then
        mdlLevel_setTransparency ActiveModelReference.MdlModelRefP, oLv.ID, 0.4    ' Transparency between 0 and 1
 
    End If
Next
        ActiveDesignFile.Levels.Rewrite
End Sub

The new transparency value must be set as a double value in the range between 0.0 and 1.0 corresponding to the percentage of transparency you want (0% to 100%).

See Also

Changing the presentation order of Layers