Help needed with Sketchup.exe -RubyStartup

[Frankn]

Hello everyone and happy new year!

I'm trying to launch a new instance of SketchUp and have it open a plugin at start up... this what works to launch SketchUp but it doesn't run the file. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

For now the file is just printing a line to the ruby console.

path=File.join(__dir__, "test.rb")

system('start "New SketchUp Window" "C:/Program Files/Sketchup/Sketchup 2019/SketchUp.exe" "-RubyStartup path"')

Frank

[TIG]

At startup SketchUp 'always' loads all .RB files that it finds in your user's Plugins folder.
So simply having your Ruby code in a .RB file in that folder should load it, and also run any commands etc that it defines and chooses to run...
Your _dir_ is running into issues because by the time it runs it's returning nil.
What is your thinking behind this process ?

[Frankn]

Let me try and explain what I'm trying to do because I have a few things I'd like to accomplish... this being what I think should be the first step. Though I tend to change/modify my ideas as I work on them.

Basically I have a cabinet plugin I'm working on and one thing I'd like to do is add nesting/cut sheet/layout functionality... so basically...

• identify all the top faces of the panels (I can do this).
• make a copy of the faces before adding them to an array... still need to figure this out.
• launch a new instance of SketchUp and adding the faces from the array I copied... I was thinking of making a ruby script to do this and then launch/open a plugin to manage the nesting options.

I got the idea after finding this...
https://community.sketchucation.com/topic/139502/sketchup-command-line-switches

Hopefully that's not to confusing and makes some sense.

[Dan Rathbun]

A bit late, but ...

FYI : The __dir__ global method returns the path to the file that the statement is in. (This means that you cannot use this method when pasting statements into the Ruby Console.)

That said, the system method call fails because you did not use string interpolation to stuff that value of the path variable into the parameter string, like so:

system(%[start "New SketchUp Window" "C:/Program Files/Sketchup/Sketchup 2019/SketchUp.exe" "-RubyStartup #{path}"])

Using %[ ] is another way in Ruby of delimiting a double-quoted string that supports interpolation (and as a bonus, nested double quotes.)

See: Ruby Doc : Interpolable String Literals