This is for a research project that I'm doing for school for the summer.

Hi,

I'm working a project where I would like to get ruby drawing info using the Sketchup API and then translate that into a more reasonable data format (basically ADTs). So I would ideally have info about each major object (vaguely defined) such as a wall, a window, a ceiling, etc and where each component belongs and what is adjacent to each component. Then I would like to export this data to Java and optimize the amount of daylight in the room by moving the windows around. Then write the results back to sketchup to make a new drawing.

Has anyone done anything like this before? It seems like a lot of work to build the data structures, but I can do something like

for ent in Sketchup.active_model.active_entities and then check
ent.is_a? Face (then check if it's opaque or not to see if it's a window)

to build the data structures and the relationships between them.

How should I go about exporting the data I gather? I could write it to a text file and then read the text file into Java. Or I could put it into a database. I haven't done any database programming, but ruby has a lot of database libraries.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.