Component best practices

Garry K

I have a couple of questions:

Is there a way to get Sketchup to look in more than 1 location for components (SU 7) in a similar way that we can for plugins where we add a "loader.rb" file into plugins folder?
I want to put specific components into a folder within my plugin. In this case these are cabinet door handles. I start out by supplying 4 handles. I have set the insertion point to the center of the handle and have left a construction point there. Is this ok or do users frown upon having a construction point at the insertion point?

Dave R

Garry,

You can establish "Favorite" component libraries that can be in locations other than the native Components folder. You can open or create a local collection via the Details menu. I have no idea if you would be able to use the Ruby API to open a library packed with your plugin and then make it a favorite.

I would appreciate the insertion points for the handle components being centered. I set the insertion point for most of the hardware components I create and pulls almost always get placed by their centers. I wouldn't need the guide point located there. If it was there I would just delete it the next time I hit the keyboard shortcut for Edit>Delete Guides. If there had to be some indicator of the center, I would rather it be a guide point than crossed line segments or something. At least guide points are easily deleted.

Garry K

Dave,

Insertion point at the center is what I have been doing.

After I verified that my plugin is correctly positioning the handle I removed the construction points.

I'm also requiring the handles to be oriented as in the sample. The plugin will rotate them into a horizontal position for a few handle locations such as drawer fronts. The handle is inserted inside the Door component and therefore gets moved with the door / drawer front and or rotated around the Z_AXIS

I'm providing 4 basic handles. If the user wants to drop additional handles into my handles folder then they will appear in the drop down list and will be used when adding doors / drawer fronts to the sketch.

Handle

Krisidious

I hate construction points... Mainly because it's such a pain to get to them and delete them.

Dave R

Garry, that looks good.

@krisidious said:

I hate construction points... Mainly because it's such a pain to get to them and delete them.

Really? Edit>Delete Guides is too difficult? How about doing what I did and make a keyboard shortcut.

Krisidious

@dave r said:

Garry, that looks good.

@krisidious said:

I hate construction points... Mainly because it's such a pain to get to them and delete them.

Really? Edit>Delete Guides is too difficult? How about doing what I did and make a keyboard shortcut.

I thought that only deleted guides... I didn't know construction points were "guides", thought that was for construction guide lines only. Nice to know.