ApliCAD

DonaCAD, an AutoCAD plugin for Mercadona's store drawings

Architecture · 2020

AutoCAD plugin that lets Mercadona draw its stores to a single standard, calculate areas automatically and push each store's data to its corporate database.

Client
Mercadona
Sector
Architecture
Year
2020
Software used
AutoCAD
Services
Custom development ERP integration

The challenge

Mercadona designs and refurbishes many stores every year in Spain and Portugal. Each technician drew with their own layers and blocks, areas were measured by hand and each store’s data (net and gross areas, checkouts, parking spaces) was typed by hand into the corporate systems. That made stores hard to compare and the figures hard to trust.

The solution

Since 2020 we have been developing DonaCAD, an AutoCAD plugin written in C# on the AutoCAD .NET API, which now runs on AutoCAD 2025 and .NET 8. It adds its own menu and turns each drawing into a document with data:

  • Controlled block library: furniture blocks and sets with a unique name, category and layer, published by an administrator from the database. They are placed with a live preview (jigs), and every block has a Spanish and a Portuguese version.
  • Areas calculated automatically: spaces are drawn as polylines and tagged from a standard catalogue. The plugin calculates net and gross areas per floor, detects overlaps and open polylines, and generates the area schedule.
  • The drawing keeps itself up to date: through document events, moving or editing an element updates its areas, its labels and the space it belongs to. The store, the active floor and the data model version are stored in the DWG itself (dictionaries and XData).
  • Drawing standard: layers per floor and layer groups, one-click floor switching, level and section dimensions, evacuation routes with a maximum-length warning, floor load labels, parking, and viewport setup for plotting.
  • Store data sheet and corporate data: it fills in each store’s data sheet with figures taken from the drawing and uploads them to Mercadona’s corporate database (SQL Server), emails change notifications and exports the data to Excel. A single command purges, audits, updates the data sheet and uploads the data.

Outcome

Every store drawing follows the same standard, areas come from the drawing rather than a calculator, and each store’s corporate data matches its drawing. The project has been in continuous development for more than five years, with versions for each AutoCAD release and in both Spanish and Portuguese.