If anyone is still interested throw-to will do the trick... See link below. http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=51542

@sdmitch said: Great, I'm glad that it proved to be of some use. The version you have doesn't remove the edge and always just gives you the the first component in the definitions list. I have sent you, by Personal Message, a version that truly replaces the edge with the component as well as giving you a drop down list of all the components in the model to choose from. I'll try to look into it (the new version) tonight. Great about the drop down list of components. My memory doesn't always recall which component to type in. Now I can create dashed lines and proper centerlines (and other types), sort of a library to choose from. I may have one or two other suggestions:- (not always) delete the replaces edges, a choice so to speak. a choice whether all replacing components should be grouped or not. All 3D Polyline components into one big group (as visual reference) or not, by choice of the user. But I'll have to see /experiment with converting floor plans, symbols etc. to see what works best. And then I still have to rely on what you are willing to add. If anyone has suggestions or hints, please post them here.. Thank you!

Yea, like you wouldn't feed raw user data to your database, you don't want to feed user data to eval. (I consider anything read in from the system or file to be "user data"). Validate and sanitize - this is the stuff you want to find a library that has solved all the edge cases for you.

is there a better solution for this now?

Oh and one more.. I found something called 'ImageMajik' if i use those kind of external tool ,Can others use my .rb file without installing 'ImageMajik' in sketchup just by applying .rb to plugin folder ? if they don't need to install , let me know how to install those please.

Thanks for the reply! I am absolutely amazed that the "only" sollution for this most fundamental function is a 300 euro plug-in. That's... very sad for a software as user-friendly as SketchUp. Well, I guess it will be wiser to man up and switch to Blender after all and get all I need for free. But still! Thank you for information.

TIG, you rock. Thanks for the help (including all the other countless posts of yours I've read on other threads that have taught me so much so far). I think that got it after having it load once (with the exception of one situation where I need it to load separately each time - I have a 'container' component that other sub-components get inserted into, and if it's not reloaded, then the previous sub-component instances are in the new container instance as well, which I don't want). I also changed the path \, and float, and yes 0 length is getting trapped. I still have so much to learn...

Yes everything. All entities in all entities-collections.

Turns out it's a stdcall which has no mangling. I can debug the c extension in CBuilder. Very fast. Now I need to experiment with arguments etc. That will be the acid test for stdcall If anyone is interested I can post the files and the steps. Once I get a real good handle on this I'll try it out with XE7 which is a compiler that compiles Win32, Win64 and OSX. I will also test this on my lap top where Borland memory manager (a dll) doesn't exist. It will tell me if I need to include any of these files or not.

fantastic as always. Thank you slbaumgartner and sdmitch. The flip all x works perfectly! The sdmitch code already was great. This forum is always great. I will make a simple free plug-in to help road build, and share here when it is ready.

thanks John, already did that though (screenshot above is a watermark). the problem with this system is that you are forcing a new style on the user: if the user has a sketchy style on, you cannot have the bars and keep the sketchy style. (in other words we cannot load watermarks without loading a style as well). that's why i mentioned about another route: find user current style > save it as variable > load the 'grid' style > restore user style from variable when finished. alas, no way to get the previous style back in. whether from the 'in model' style, or trying to save it to a temp directory and loading it back from there. (at least i found no info at all anywhere). PS least of all the api docs!

Thank you Thom.

For my own extensions that I write now I usually drop support for anything older than SU2014 - due to Ruby 2.0 and other improvements since then.

I've run into issues with taking the fist or second Mac Address out of ifconfig or ipconfig /all. I've changed the code to look at the entire file and then to step through it line by line and treat it as a bit of a state machine. Thanks to pgarmyn and Driven I think I've got some code that will work. They both helped with files as have a handful of other people. With windows I've tested files in English, French, Russian and some with VMWare set up. With OSX I've just tested in English. Mac Address

@thomthom said: The BoundingBox object you get when you query the instance will always be oriented to world space. To get the bounding box as drawn in the UI you need to get the bounds of the definition - fetch all the points from its corners and transform them using the current edit_transform and the selected instance transform. That extension I linked to does all that. Ah! Thanks for the explaination ThomThom! I didn't realise that's what happened with instances' bounding boxes...very confusing for a novice! I did take the time to check out your extension and was able to understand what you're doing and apply that to my own code... thanks again sir!

@jolran said: As a continuation of Thomthoms advice. Should you ever want to create a C-extension easily for distance between Points the code is already written and available https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/sketchup-ruby-c-extension/src/e2fe0f2e43e43ebae568535b6d7a98e160b4624c/src/Example%20-%20Basics/SXBasics.c?at=default Note: That example is OLD! You can refer to it for how I resolve the distance calculation, but had I done that today I would have done it in C++ using Visual Studio and Xcode: https://github.com/SketchUp/ruby-c-extension-examples

@archidave said: but in SU 2015; > 2.m.abs gives the NoMethodError This is pretty bad (it has broken my plugin for SU 2015) and means I now need to go hunting through the code for all occurrences of <Length>.abs replacing them with <Length>.to_f.abs and building-in extra validation where the class is not intrinsically known, just in case there could be a Length instead of a Float. The Length class used to be a subclass of Float. However this isn't really possible in Ruby, but from the Ruby C API this was hacked together a way to do so. When we added 64bit support in SU2015 this broke because the data structures where different. So we had to re-implement Length by forwarding the methods to Float. Initially this used the Ruby Standard Library, but due to another bug in Ruby where the StdLib would not always load if there was unicode characters in the user's username the StdLib would fail and the Length class would not properly initialize. There was also a bug in SU at some point where the StdLib would fail to load if the user started SketchUp by double clicking an SKP file. We later corrected the new Length implementation to not use StdLib so it would not fail if the StdLib failed to load. And we also fixed the bug regarding starting SU via SKP files. But those fixes should be in SU2015M2 - so I don't understand why you'd experience such problems. I am not able to reproduce your error. Can you try without any extensions enabled - just so we can eliminate that possibility?

@unknownuser said: There is no "external" ruby pipeline. Phew, I was worried for a moment.

If anyone is interested, I finally solved my imported group's origin problem fairly simply with this... ga = entities.grep(Sketchup::Group) ga.each { |e| n=e.name; e.model.entities.add_group(e); e.parent.instances[0].name=n} Basically it just takes all the groups after import, adds them into a new group and names the new group the same name. This resets the origin, and allows the swap code to work properly.

@driven said: well, they have always said not to rely on them... but this works on my mac, but isn't in the list... Sketchup.send_action "select3dTextTool;" john it works also in windows 7 it was not documented thank you