Gathering attributes from a block insertion

In an earlier post I showed a routine for gathering attributes from a block insertion object.  I have since found a better way to get the attribute objects.

For years I have been using vla-get-attributes, which returns a variant, which must then be converted to a safearray and then a list.  The “New and Improved” method is to use vlax-invoke.

Below are a couple of test procedures I used to benchmark these two methods.

First, I selected the block insertion and converted the entity name to a vla object.

(setq obj (vlax-ename->vla-object(car (entsel))))

Here are the two functions.  AttTest1 using vla-getattributes, and AttTest2 using vlax-invoke.  Note that the functions are defined using Defun-q rather than Defun.  This is because the benchmarking routine I used (by Vladimir Nesterovsky – Profiler) requires defun-q.  I typically change the defun to defun-q to run the profiler, then change it back.

(defun-q attTest1
     ()
     (vlax-safearray->list
       (vlax-variant-value
         (vla-getattributes obj)
       )
     )
     (princ)
)

(defun-q attTest2
     ()
     (vlax-invoke obj 'getattributes)
     (princ)
)

Now for the fun part. Profile-Func is a routine in Vladimir’s profiler that registers the function and starts the timer.

(profile-func 'attTest1)
(profile-func 'attTest2)

Below are the timer results after running both routines 10 times.

Routine	Number of runs timed	Total seconds for all runs	Average seconds per run
AttTest1	10	0.4	0.041
AttTest2	10	0.07	0.007

To put this in perspective, the test block I created for this has 10,000 attributes.  That’s 0.00007 milliseconds per attribute!  Not too shabby!  Needless to say, I am going to be using vlax-invoke to get block attributes on all my routines in the future.  In addition I am going to be looking much more closely at the vlax functions.  I am particularly interested in using vlax-invoke with the GetDynamicBlockProperties method.