VBA Point Cloud Check

PoinTools APIs

Manipulation of point clouds is a memory-intensive task.  I believe that, to cope with the size of clouds, PoinTools makes use of memory-mapped files.  AFAIK the C++ MicroStationAPI is the only API that deals with point clouds.

Peter Willmen said:

there does not seem to be any functionality in VBA to manipulate Point Clouds

VBA dates from the previous century,  when a 32-bit system was the norm.  It evolved from 16-bit forebears.  It has large overheads imposed by its COM interface and associated data marshaling. Consequently, VBA would find it hard going to cope with the memory management required by millions or billions of points.  My guess is that we're unlikely to see any point cloud support in VBA.

Thanks Jon.

I know that the functionality to manipulate the Point Clouds is not available.

All I need to do at the moment is to check whether there are Point Clouds attached to the DGN. A bonus would be to also retrieve the file names.

Peter Willmen said:

All I need to do at the moment is to check whether there are Point Clouds attached to the DGN

The MicroStationAPI and DgnPlatformNet provide...

• PointCloudHandler, which will enable a model scan to find any instances of point clouds
• PointCloudQuery, which inherits from PointCloudHandler, providing information about a point cloud instance

IPointCloudFileQuery provides the information you request...

• GetFileName
• GetNumberOfPoints
• GetNumberOfClouds

#include <PointCloudFileEdit.h>
static IPointCloudFileQueryPtr CreateFileQuery(ElementHandleCR  eh) 

However, those are all C++ or .NET classes and their methods.  VBA doesn't have the insight to be able to use those directly.  A compromise would be a helper app written in C++ or .NET, probably the latter.  A .NET app can provide a COM interface that you could call directly from VBA.