From the course: AutoCAD Customization for CAD Managers

Visibility states - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Customization for CAD Managers

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Visibility states

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- (Male Voiceover) Although visibility is shown up here in our parameters tab, it behaves different from the other parameters. Let's add a visibility parameter to our manholes block here in our exercise. When I click on it, I just place it here and it says visibility one, but notice now in the block editor ribbon, in the visibility panel, this is no longer grayed out. I now have visibility states. So let's rename this visibility parameter to manhole type, and we can come up now, to the visibility states, and change what is shown depending on what's selected. So I can change this and say this is a 48 inch manhole, and we can create a new visibility state. Let's do that, let's go ahead and click okay, and we're going to save this block, close the block editor, save the changes and we're going to go ahead and just copy clip this object here. I'm going to use a special type of copy clip. It's not showing up here, but if you type in the copy base, you can specify a base point. So the base point we're going to use is my object snap center, so I'm going to turn my object snap on, and we're simply going to use the center object snap. And then we're going to select all these objects, and we're going to copy them, press enter when we're done. And then simply go back to block editor here, by selecting the block, right clicking and choosing block editor. We're going to create a new visibility state, so I'm going to come up here under visibility states, say new, and we're going to name this as 72 inch manhole. We can choose whether or not to leave any of these objects that are visible in the 48 inch manhole visibility state; whether they're visible, whether we're going to hide them all. In this case, we're hiding them all. We'll click okay, and we'll click okay and it looks like we have a brand new slate to start from. And we're simply going to go into the home ribbon clipboard panel and paste all those objects right here. And I'm simply going to use the zero comma zero, for the base point of our insertion or our block to place all those in. So what happens now, I go back to my block editor ribbon, is depending on which visibility state I have selected, will make a difference on what is visible. Let's see how this works. I close the block editor, I save the changes, and just choose whether I want a 72 inch manhole or a 48 inch manhole. This allows us to use one block for many different sizes of elements or components that the user may need. It really reduces the library that they have to sift through and that we have to manage. Whether or not we use parameters or actions, visibility states on their own, provide a powerful tool to be efficient and keep our block libraries clean, consistent and simple.

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