Accessing submenus / extension manager

azuby

Hi folks,

maybe my question will go to /dev/null when the old Sketchup forum moves, I ask my question here again: I need to access submenus to create an extension manager to organize Ruby scripts and make programming them more easy. I do ask this question, because of the high dynamic behaviour of UI.menu - it returns new objects when you call it for the same string. But when I want to organize scripts, I have to remember menus, submenus and subsub... to put the extensions to the right place. That does not work at the moment, because I had to modify some built-in methods and stay deal with outdated menu objects. I can't use the old UI#add_submenu, because this method is very stupid and adds anything it gets - so this method is the reason for doublettes within the menu structure.

Also see:
http://errorinitus.de/?sect=software (extensionmanager)
Dead link
Dead link
Dead link

azuby

Jim

What about using a WebDialog? The thought has been brewing in the back of my mind for awhile about a WebDialog based Add-In Manager.

Have a look at this menu example for a possible idea: http://www.zzee.com/art-html-listing/samples/apache/jsmenuVer.html

Edit: On second thought, this might not work so well.

What you want to do is difficult, otherwise it'd be done already

azuby

Thanks for the idea. It would be possible using webdialogs for extensions. The HTML source needs to be auto-genereated in this case - that's not a big deal. But the disadvantage of this is, that by using a webdialog-extensionmanager two types of extensions will be create: the regular ones for the Sketchup menus and the other ones for the webdialog. I guess, a lot of extensionmanager-hacking could start when using webdialogs

Look the first link I posted - a nearly working version of the extensionmanager is ready. The only big problem is the described one.

azuby

azuby

I've added an example on how easy it is to write/reconstruct Ruby Sketchup extension to use with the extensionmanager. For that I have modified a copy of the Dome script (dome.rb) - actually documented in German (in a PDF), but the code (in PDF an .rb files) should be readable for any extension developer.

You can download it under the extensionmanager category on http://errorinitus.de/?sect=software

If the extensionmanager becomes older, there maybe is the work to define categories and sub-categories the extension should be set to. Actually I use the categories from the organizer.rb.

azuby

RickW

I wrote a pair of ruby scripts that automatically rewrote the menu section of every script in the plugins folder (except for the utility scripts from SU) and then allowed users to organize their scripts into subfolders. It was temporarily available at http://www.smustard.com

One downfall was that double-clicking a file in the browser caused the scripts to not load. There might be a way around that now.

Another problem was that a few scripts couldn't be rewritten by the rewrite script because of strange formatting by the authors.

azuby

Hi Rick,

I think you're talking about the organizer.rb also Burkhard supported? I find it very useful. My idea was constistency in the Plugins menu of all users. That had to be done by hand, because @Last/Google does not provide a good Plugin mechanism. Also organizer.rb works with a categorization like my approach.

Maybe the Google guys are so nice adding a "Menu#submenus[]" or "Menu#parent" to the Menu class. That would simplify the problem. Than the only thing to manage would be to tetermine the categories and subcategories, the rest works automatically (with internationalization ). Do you know the person I have to contact for this request?

We would have some advantages of using a kind of my approach:

consistency
no dublicates in the menus
Ruby programmers can write their code with own code style
developing extensions gets more simple
internationalization
Ruby extensions build "the old way" also would work
real Sketchup extensions, which you can switch on and off in the preferences

azuby

Burkhard

@Rick
you've found a solution running the script with SU6?
Btw. where on smustard is it? There is no organizer script with that name.

RickW

Burkhard,

Yes, I fixed it last night and just sent it to you. There were a few reasons (like I mentioned above) that I took it off of Smustard, but am considering putting it back up.

juju

RickW, please let us know here at the forum if / when you make the revised script available as well as where.

RickW

Juju,

Will do

Jim

azuby,

I came up with this code. It stores the menu object in a Hash on creation. But it doesn't work for the reasons you stated.


class Sketchup;;Menu
   @@submenus = {}
   alias ;old_add_submenu ;add_submenu
   def add_submenu(name)
      @@submenus[name] = old_add_submenu(name)
   end
   def self.submenus
      @@submenus
   end
end

Well, it builds the hash correctly, and you can access the sub menus by name:


Sketchup;;Menu.submenus["SomeName"].add_item("Say Hi") { UI.messagebox("Hi!") }

The above example does not work. It give no error, but it doesn't add the menu item either. Too bad as it would then be dead simple to hijack the add_submenu and add_item methods to create the menu tree, and no script would need changed to fit into a certain category.

azuby

Yes Jim, I know that. If you go into the sources of the extensionmanager (mentioned in the first posting, first link - don't panic allthough it's a german website ), it is already done - a bit more complicated, because you have to remember the submenus for their parent menu, not all in the Menu object (you could have two "Preferences" menus coming from twot extensions). Thank you very much for verifying my problem.

azuby

azuby

Isn't this strange:

UI.menu().add_submenu '(none)'
#<Sketchup;;Menu;0x1fba478>  # => '(none)' in Plugins
UI.menu("Plugouts").add_submenu 'Plugouts'
#<Sketchup;;Menu;0xfbef4c0>  # => 'Plugouts' in Plugins
UI.menu("P").add_submenu 'P'
#<Sketchup;;Menu;0xfba8c90> # => 'P' in Plugins
UI.menu("p").add_submenu 'p'
#<Sketchup;;Menu;0x102da520> # => 'p' in Plugins
UI.menu("pong").add_submenu 'pong'
#<Sketchup;;Menu;0x102abb70>  # => 'pong' in Plugins
UI.menu("Olugins").add_submenu 'Olugins'
Exception `ArgumentError' at (eval);475 - Unknown menu olugins
Exception `ArgumentError' at (eval);475 - (eval);475;in `menu'; Unknown menu olugins
Error; #<ArgumentError; (eval);475;in `menu'; Unknown menu olugins>
(eval);475
UI.menu("asdf").add_submenu 'asdf'
Exception `ArgumentError' at (eval);475 - Unknown menu asdf
Exception `ArgumentError' at (eval);475 - (eval);475;in `menu'; Unknown menu asdf
Error; #<ArgumentError; (eval);475;in `menu'; Unknown menu asdf>
(eval);475

azuby

Jim


("a".."z").each { |l| 
begin
print "Trying #{l};"
UI.menu(l).add_submenu('jim')
puts "OK"
rescue
puts "Error on #{l}."
end
}

I don't like the "code" font, by the way; it's hard to read.