Setting the Date and Time for a Shadows study

[KevinKarney]

I am just starting on Ruby scripting, so there is probably an obvious answer to this...
I need to be able to change the date and time from within a script and can find nothing in the documentation of how to do this.
Any help would be most appreciated

[Chris Fullmer]

Welcome!, there lots of us just learning around here right now. Its a great time to learn ruby!

This shows the shadow info for the model.
model = Sketchup.active_model model.shadow_info.to_a.join(', ')

Here is an example of how to adjust the information:
model = Sketchup.active_model shadowinfo = model.shadow_info value = shadowinfo["City"] UI.messagebox value value = shadowinfo["City"]="Denver, CO" UI.messagebox value

And here is a link to the ShadowInfo class in the API:

http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/shadowinfo.html

the []= method is the one that shows how to set the values in the shadowinfo hash. Hope that helps, keep asking questions,

Chris

[Jim]

Welcome Kevin,

The time and date settings, among others, are stored in the ShadowInfo class.

It acts like an attribute array, so you get and set the values by name;

shadow_info = Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info
time = shadow_info["ShadowTime"]
shadow_info["Longitude"] = 105.2830

F u l l M E R ! (beat me to it.)

[Matt666]

Just one thing: To know all parameters of a shadow_info entity, you can use .keys
Exemple:

Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info.keys

will returns

["City", "Country", "Dark", "DayOfYear", "DaylightSavings", "DisplayNorth", "DisplayOnAllFaces", "DisplayOnGroundPlane", "DisplayShadows", "EdgesCastShadows", "Latitude", "Light", "Longitude", "NorthAngle", "ShadowTime", "ShadowTime_time_t", "SunDirection", "SunRise", "SunRise_time_t", "SunSet", "SunSet_time_t", "TZOffset", "UseSunForAllShading"]

If you want to know one of these parameters, just do like that:

Sketchup.active_model.shadow_info["City"]

[KevinKarney]

Chris, Mat, Jim
Many thanks - each of your responses added that extra bit to my knowledge. I think I have all I need for the next step of my journey. I am trying to build a virtual sundial correct for any Latitude and Longitude - which may seem a bit of a strange task. But Stetchup has rather a good model of the Earth's movement around the Sun. It correctly distinguishes between solar time - as seen on a sundial - from civil time - as read from your watch. So, with its ability to cast shadows correctly, a sundial simulator should not be too difficult.

I'll keep you posted !