1. C/C++
2. Fundamentals

Getting the Units of the Active Document

by Dale Fugier (Last modified: 12 Mar 2019)

This brief guide demonstrates how to determine the unit system of the active document.

Overview

There are two unit systems associated with a document, model and page units. The ON_UnitSystem class makes it easy to work with custom units. The Rhino document class contains two functions to return these unit systems:

1. const ON_UnitSystem& CRhinoDoc::ModelUnits() const;
2. const ON_UnitSystem& CRhinoDoc::PageUnits() const;

More information

The unit system of the active document is stored on an ON_3dmUnitsAndTolerances class that is located on the CRhinoDoc object.

If you inside of a CRhinoCommand-derived object’s RunCommand() member, you can get the current units system as follows:

const CRhinoDocProperties& doc_props = context.m_doc.Properties();
const ON_3dmUnitsAndTolerances& units_tolerances = doc_props.ModelUnitsAndTolerances();
ON::LengthUnitSystem units_system = units_tolerances.m_unit_system;

As a shortcut, you can do the following:

ON::LengthUnitSystem units_system = context.m_doc.UnitSystem();

If you outside of a CRhinoCommand-derived object’s RunCommand() member, you can get the current units system as follows:

CRhinoDoc* doc = RhinoApp().ActiveDoc();
if (nullptr != doc)
{
  ON::LengthUnitSystem units_system = doc->UnitSystem();
}