State of Observers Redux — 18 August 2011

[thomthom]

I've begun on a revision of the State of Observers:
http://www.thomthom.net/software/sketchup/observers/

Could you please have a look and let me know if have information that would fit in this.

(p.s. The page is in HTML5 - so if you use silly old browsers it might not look good - I've not tested it yes, just in Firefox 3.6. Atm I'm focusing on the content.)

---

Added public bug tracker to the BitBucket repo:
https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/sketchup-observers/issues?status=new&status=open

People can add reports of broken observer events there.

[thomthom]

Was there an observer hidden in the API docs somewhere that was listed in between the methods of another class instead of a class of its own?

[Dan Rathbun]

@thomthom said:

Was there an observer hidden in the API docs somewhere that was listed in between the methods of another class instead of a class of its own?

Yes.. it is the FrameChangeObserver, see the Pages class.

@unknownuser said:

(http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f )":223huwu2]
@mtalbott said:

I am trying to animate objects based on Scene Changes and not with the interact tool.

topic: Dynamic Components that react to scene (aka page) changes

in this post: Re: Using an observer to delete a screen note I said the following:

@chris fullmer said:

That's interesting. I've never noticed that [FrameChangeObserver observer] ...

Yes that is because is one of the API missing class boo-boos. It IS mentioned within the API, in passing.
Pages.add_frame_change_observer
Pages.remove_frame_change_observer

It was featured (documented) in the Sketchup API BlogSpot:
Dynamic Components that react to scene (aka page) changes

('scenes.rb') Code properly formatted (by Todd Burch) at:
http://www.smustard.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=25

It basically only has one event callback:
frameChange( fromPage, toPage, percent_done ),
the intialize method, plus any custom method(s) you need inside to keep your code readable and organized.

~

[Dan Rathbun]

And I think Jim had doubts whether it worked during an animation export.

PS, the table page looks fine under MSIE 7.
"Depreciated" has no "i" in it. And the methods that were removed can not be "Deprecated", they are "Abandoned", "Deceased".. whatever they are no longer even in the Observer protoclass.
.

[Krisidious]

they should have you on staff Thom...

[Dan Rathbun]

MaterialsObserver.onMaterialRefChange

"When purging materials, or right-clicking a material in the Material Browser this event triggers one time for every entity with a material. This cause a long series of events to trigger unnessesary."

should read:
"When purging materials, or right-clicking a material in the Material Browser, this event triggers one time for every entity with a material. This causes a long series of events to trigger unnecessarily."

~

[Jim]

Great work, and great resource. Thanks for doing it.

[thomthom]

Thanks Dan, knew it was hiding somewhere.

Thanks for the spelling control - I didn't run a spell-checker or proofread yet.

@dan rathbun said:

"Depreciated" has no "i" in it. And the methods that were removed can not be "Deprecated", they are "Abandoned", "Deceased".. whatever they are no longer even in the Observer protoclass.

It's what the API docs said. I've not tested if the events are actually removed, or just aliased to their new names...

[thomthom]

@dan rathbun said:

"Depreciated" has no "i" in it.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Depreciated?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic

[thomthom]

Oh, "Depreciated" refer to value...

grumble something about English and too similar words

[thomthom]

Another issue, I imagine I read some reports on MaterialObserver.onMaterialSetCurrent not working as it should on OSX in some versions of SU?

[Dan Rathbun]

@thomthom said:

It's what the API docs said. I've not tested if the events are actually removed, or just aliased to their new names...

I did test the MaterialObserver's Bulk change method. It has been removed from the superclass, so when you create an instance of a MaterialObserver subclass, it just is not there, and if you were to explicitly call the callback, a NoMethodError exception will be raised. Ie, there is no aliasing to the individual change callback(s).

So if you wanted to handle events in a bulk manner, you'd need to do it on the Ruby side, perhaps with a Ruby standard Observer class, or a bulkchange boolean flag variable and an Array of changed objects (each individual SU change callback would need to push it's object into the Array.)

[Dan Rathbun]

@thomthom said:

Another issue, I imagine I read some reports on MaterialObserver.onMaterialSetCurrent not working as it should on OSX in some versions of SU?

YES.. I posted the answer that Scott gave me. He says it's logged as an internal bug.

See GG post: Materials.current on OS X
.

[thomthom]

http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/pages.html#add_frame_change_observer
Sketchup::Pages.add_frame_change_observer(FrameChangeObserver.new)

This, surprisingly worked.

I'd thought you'd have to reference the model first...
Sketchup.active_model.pages.add_frame_change_observer(FrameChangeObserver.new)

[thomthom]

@dan rathbun said:

@thomthom said:

Another issue, I imagine I read some reports on MaterialObserver.onMaterialSetCurrent not working as it should on OSX in some versions of SU?

YES.. I posted the answer that Scott gave me. He says it's logged as an internal bug.

See GG post: Materials.current on OS X
.

So it's bugged on SU6, SU7.0, SU 7.1?

[thomthom]

@dan rathbun said:

@thomthom said:

It's what the API docs said. I've not tested if the events are actually removed, or just aliased to their new names...

I did test the MaterialObserver's Bulk change method. It has been removed from the superclass, so when you create an instance of a MaterialObserver subclass, it just is not there, and if you were to explicitly call the callback, a NoMethodError exception will be raised. Ie, there is no aliasing to the individual change callback(s).

So if you wanted to handle events in a bulk manner, you'd need to do it on the Ruby side, perhaps with a Ruby standard Observer class, or a bulkchange boolean flag variable and an Array of changed objects (each individual SU change callback would need to push it's object into the Array.)

bulk change event? Is that one that has been removed from the API?
That was a troublesome points when I made this chart - they recently removed some events from the API....

[Dan Rathbun]

@thomthom said:

So it's bugged on SU6, SU7.0, SU 7.1?

Careful.. the collection getter method Materials.current IS bugged, the question remains, is the MaterialsObserver bugged as well. You'd need to test versions on the Mac to find out.
.

[Dan Rathbun]

@thomthom said:

bulk change event? Is that one that has been removed from the API?
That was a troublesome points when I made this chart - they recently removed some events from the API....

Yes.. the MaterialsObserver.onMaterialRemoveAll callback was removed, as it never worked, and/or never got called. So there was no point in deprecating it.

[thomthom]

@dan rathbun said:

@thomthom said:

bulk change event? Is that one that has been removed from the API?
That was a troublesome points when I made this chart - they recently removed some events from the API....

Yes.. the MaterialsObserver.onMaterialRemoveAll callback was removed, as it never worked, and/or never got called. So there was no point in deprecating it.

I'd like to add it for historic purpose - anyone remembers it parameters?

[thomthom]

@thomthom said:

@dan rathbun said:

@thomthom said:

bulk change event? Is that one that has been removed from the API?
That was a troublesome points when I made this chart - they recently removed some events from the API....

Yes.. the MaterialsObserver.onMaterialRemoveAll callback was removed, as it never worked, and/or never got called. So there was no point in deprecating it.

I'd like to add it for historic purpose - anyone remembers it parameters?

Ah - already got it.
Thought there was an event named onBulkChange, like the SelectionObserver has.