Topic Title

The following links should help you learning legacy DCAL

The legacy DCAL compiler can be downloaded from the following link. The zip file contains folder information along with files. The zip file also includes sample source codes.


The legacy DCAL exists in DataCAD so that users can still use the macro's they have purchased from 3rd party vendors.

The legacy DCAL was very limited. It would be at DataCAD first who add new functions for DCAL programmers so they can use them. The new functions would not work unless a new update is issued to the public and downloaded by users. Programmers could not create customized dialog boxes, or use 3rd party toolkits/modules to interpret the data. Now using Windows API or ActiveX controls you build macros that can read/write Word,Excel,DWG files or get the data from the Web or create any complex dialog box.The new DCAL needed to overcome these problems.

Legacy DCAL is single precision and thus causes rounding errors in decimal values when data moves between the macro and drawing file.

DC5 files were single precision and thus maximum size of the drawing gile could be 256MB. The new AEC file can be 1GB and thus legacy DCAL may cease to operate correctly for files over 256MB.

The hard-coded Dcadwin.exe was due to my lack of knowledge of the build names that are made available to public. This problem came into picture a couple of months ago and was logged as a Bug in the database. Today again after reading your message I decided to fix the problem and achieved success in doing so. Some changes had to be made which will require the building of macros again with newer version of Header files. No change in source code at your part will be required except the compilation with new libraries. I cannot tell you when the new version of these libraries will be available as it also requires all the flavors of DataCAD to be updated. All I can assure you that your coding methods will need no change.

First of all you should delete Dcadwin.exe from the 'DCAL for Delphi' folder and Rename your DcadDemo.exe to Dcadwin.exe. The only 1 ill effects that will happen is, your shortcut to Dcaddemo.exe will not work and need to be reassigned to Dcadwin.exe instead.

Dcadwin.exe works as a server to your client macro. Since the client macro currently looks for Dcadwin.exe (harcoded name), it cannot communicate with anything else. If under current system you do not want to rename your dcaddemo.exe, you can change Dcadwin.exe to Dcaddemo.exe in UInterfaces.pas and recompile your macro. This will cause macro to execute now with Dcaddemo.exe rather that dcadwin.exe because the client macro now looks for dcaddemo.exe.

Hope this helps and I am sorry for creating all the confusion.

That's great Pietro. Good news.

Thanks,
Miguel