Towards a complete extension: Good Practices

hsmyers

I have with the aid of snippets and Alexander C. Schreyer's Ruby Code Editor stumbled my way to a example that does what I wish. Its of the form:


#
# bbtools.rb script to add tools for bounding box manipulation
#

module HSM
  module BBTools
    class BBTool

.
.
.
vital essence
.
.
.
    end # class BBTool
  end # module BBTools
end # module HSM

and while in the editor I invoke it with:


tool = HSM;;BBTools;;BBTool.new()
tool.runTool()

At this point I'd like to make it a 'real' extension. By that I mean add it to one of the pull down menus in SU. I believe I need to do this in a separate file where I essentially tell SU about my tool and where I will place it.

there is also the matter of:


Extension Wrappers; All extensions in the Extension Warehouse must be wrapped
with a SketchupExtension class so that the user can enable and disable the
extension from the Preferences dialog and/or the Extension Warehouse UI.

At this point I admit to being clueless about how to accomplish this last step. My goal is to at some point publish and I believe that adds a layer of complexity as well.

Advice? Suggestions. Brickbats? Catcalls? Bring it on---Please !!

TIG

Get some others recent Extensions to see how it's done by them...
e.g. some of my recent ones like "LayerWatcher"...

hsmyers

@tig said:

Get some others recent Extensions to see how it's done by them...
e.g. some of my recent ones like "LayerWatcher"...

Cool!! I will

Dan Rathbun

@hsmyers said:

My goal is to at some point publish and I believe that adds a layer of complexity as well.

Then you'll need to follow:
http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/developer_center/ew_developer#rbz

hsmyers

@dan rathbun said:

Then you'll need to follow:
http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/developer_center/ew_developer#rbz

I've read through same and I plan to do so again more thoroughly again after I get this next layer of magic nailed down. I think I now understand the two file format well enough to give it a spin in a bit but am momentarily busy prepping prototype parts for shapeways. Its been tool, prototype, tool, proto in a kind of recursive spiral! Need one for the other and round about we go...