[MicroStation V8i SS3 VBA] Why the macro execution speed depends on the zoom in the drawing?

HI Mateusz,

at first, please read and follow the forum best practices: How an discussion can be started when you do not provide even basic information like used product, its version (build number) and what API / language is used?

Mateusz Czajkowski said:

whenever I have a macro with a loop that scans the fence

Nobody can answer your question when the code is not known.

Mateusz Czajkowski said:

when the zoom in the drawing is large, the program works slowly and when the zoom is small, the program works quickly?

How the fence is defined? Is is the same in both cases, so in "small zoom" (because this term is not clear, I would prefer to say e.g. "large extent") it's e.g. created from a view and in "large zoom" it's much bigger than the view extent and the view displays only small portion of the fence?

Or the fence is always created e.g. from view?

Regards,

  Jan

HI Mateusz,

at first, please read and follow the forum best practices: How an discussion can be started when you do not provide even basic information like used product, its version (build number) and what API / language is used?

Mateusz Czajkowski said:

whenever I have a macro with a loop that scans the fence

Nobody can answer your question when the code is not known.

Mateusz Czajkowski said:

when the zoom in the drawing is large, the program works slowly and when the zoom is small, the program works quickly?

How the fence is defined? Is is the same in both cases, so in "small zoom" (because this term is not clear, I would prefer to say e.g. "large extent") it's e.g. created from a view and in "large zoom" it's much bigger than the view extent and the view displays only small portion of the fence?

Or the fence is always created e.g. from view?

Regards,

  Jan

the program gets the vertices from polyline, then the loop sets a fence at each vertex with the code:

Sub setFence(vetex As Point3d, radius As Double)
Dim rotation As Matrix3d
Dim oText As TextElement
Dim oCircle As EllipseElement

rotation = Matrix3dFromAxisAndRotationAngle(2, 0)
Set oCircle = CreateEllipseElement2(Nothing, vetex, radius, radius, rotation)

With ActiveSettings
  .FenceVoid = False
  .FenceClip = False
  .FenceOverlap = True
End With

Set oView1 = ActiveDesignFile.Views(1)
Set oFence = ActiveDesignFile.Fence
oFence.DefineFromElement oView1, oCircle
End Sub

then it scans the texts from the fence according to the scheme

:

Sub ScanFence()
Dim counter As Integer
Dim oElement As Element
Dim oEnumerator As ElementEnumerator
Dim oFence As Fence
Set oFence = ActiveDesignFile.Fence
If oFence.IsDefined = True Then
Set oEnumerator = oFence.GetContents
Do While oEnumerator.MoveNext
Set oElement = oEnumerator.Current
If oElement.Color = 5 Then
If oElement.Type = msdElementTypeLine Or oElement.Type = msdElementTypeText Then
counter = counter + 1
End If
End If
Loop
MsgBox "The total number of elements scanned for are: " & CStr(counter)
Else
ShowError "A Fence Has Not Been Defined!"
End If
End Sub

next program calculate ... and the loop moves to the next vertex ...

Hi Mateusz,

in my opinion the code is fine.

And what about runtime conditions (fence size vs view...) I asked for?  It's the only difference between the discussed cases I see now.

I can imagine (but it should be confirmed by Bentley and also tested using some simple test macro) that when the fence is "inside view", it's optimized, because the view processing is optimized as much as possible, whereas when it's "outside view", the processing is slower.

A question is: Has fence to be used? Isn't e.g. scanning using e.g. range enough? To test (real) elements overlap is always slower than (simple) range comparison.

With regards,

  Jan

Thank you for your response.

I have another question, how can I otherwise select texts within a radius from a given point without using a fence

Mateusz Czajkowski said:

I have another question, how can I otherwise select texts within a radius from a given point without using a fence

Following the best practices, it should be posted as a new question, but ... ;-)

It depends what exactly do you mean by "text within a radius". If it's about the text origin, I would try "two steps search":

1. Scan using element range, which is very fast, but it does not find "a circle", but "a box".
2. In the second step, to evaluate exact length between a center and found candidates, which should end with texts "with origins inside the circle"

Regards,

  Jan