ACA: Property for Area of a Hatch Object

A question regarding tagging Hatch objects and being able to display the area of the hatch arose the other day. My initial response was, sure, that should not be a problem in AutoCAD® Architecture. Upon actually trying to do that, I found that there is no Area Automatic Property for Hatches. While that seems like an oversight, I then checked the object properties of Hatches and found that there is an Area property that is available through ActiveX. That is, no doubt, what drives the Area property of Hatches in the Properties palette. So while it was not quite as easy as I originally thought, it is possible to do, by creating a Formula Property that extracts the Area of the Hatch object to which the Property’s Property Set is attached. Here is how to do that:

  1. Open the Style Manager, and create a Property Set Definition that applies to Hatch objects. I called mine HatchObjects (demonstrating my incredible creativity), and will use that name in the balance of this article. If…

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