Hey thanks for all your help. You guys were totally right. The Sketchup plugins folder permissions were not allowing write access from Sketchup. Im still confused that I tried this on three macs and had the same problem, which leads me to believe the installer for the latest version of Sketchup isn't setting the correct permissions. Yet no one else can reproduce it so I don't know what to think now.

Interesting, good to know, so you're on Snow Leopard? Can anyone confirm the same thing for Lion/ Mountain Lion?

@dave r said:

I haven't had any problem installing RBZ files on my Mac with the latest release of SketchUp. I would say your blanket statement is false.

Did you install over your previous version of Sketchup? Or do a clean install like i described above?
Installing over a previous version of Sketchup doesn't produce any problems.

I have been able to reproduce this problem on multiple machines. So I don't think it is a particular permissions problem

Has anyone else had this problem?

Do a clean install of the latest version of sketchup. (back it up of course)

1. Delete the Sketchup folder in /Libary/Application Support/
2. Delete the Sketchup folder in /Users/you/Library/Application Support/
3. Delete the Sketchup plist files in /Users/you/Library/Preferences
4. Download and install the latest version of sketchup

Try to install a Sketchup extension via Preferences > Install Extension...

So Far I have tried with a few downloaded plugins, as well as pulling the example files out of the Plugins directory, zipping them up in a rbz file and installing, every time I get This very useful error dialog.

Unable to install this Extension.

SketchUp was unable to install the Extension you have chosen for some unknown reason.
Consult your Extension's documentation for additional help.

Hey guys, so I finally got a Ruby C extension to compile on both os x and windows and link curllib. I got a lot of help from Luis at the RubyInstaller group and ended up using RubyInstaller and DevKit to link curl and build using the gcc compiler included with devkit.
Here is the extension. Its a modified version of Dana's sketchup downloader, but also included uploading, basic http authentication and ssl certificate checking(all through curl). I provided instructions on how to build on both os x and windows.

https://github.com/sunglass/SunglassPlugins/tree/master/SG-SketchupHook/src/Connection%20Manager

Thanks for all your help guys.

Dana - Lets get your Sketchup downloader plugin working.

@thomthom said:

Did you look at the Hello World example I posted at BitBucket for compiling on Windows and OSX PPC/Intel?

Yeah I can get that to compile fine. Where run into problems is linking curllib (or in general linking a c library in wndows) which Is not an issue with your Hello World Example since it doesn't reference any 3rd party libraries

@ishboo said:

Hey y'all,

I have not tried compiling on windows since I own a mac. On Mac libcurl is installed system wide so it is more straightforward setting it up.

One thing that may work is trying to install libcurl using Cygwin and then trying to compile it in Cygwin as well.

I have a coworker who runs windows, so I'll have him an I check it out next week and see what we can find out!

Dana, that would be great if you could ask around. As soon as I get this cross compiled, I will clean all the code up, package it nicely and send you a pull request. btw, I also added upload and basic authentication functionality to the utility as well. My head is kinda spinning around with all the different compilers on windows. I'll spend a day looking into Cygwin soon.

@thomthom said:

I tried to compile Dana's library as well, but since the GiHub project doesn't include the CURL files it failed. And none of the packages I found at the CURL sitecontained the linked files. I asked Dana for which package he used, but it doesn't seem he found it again.

There's another thread around here that talks about Dana's repository.

Need to find out what CURL files are required.

https://github.com/danawoodman/google-sketchup-file-downloader

I had no problem building Dana's library on OS X. Like he said curl ships with OS X so it should be on your system, I think you can check by typing which curl in the Terminal. For some reason if its not there I recommend just downloading from macports and making sure its location is in your System PATH.

Dana's library currently has some inconsistencies about the name of the extension and class its building which creates some problems, in some places it is called file_downloader and in others its called fileDownloader. Change all references to file_downloader to fileDownloader. and run ruby extonf.rb then make.(ignore cmake, because his CMakeList.txt file isn't setup to link libcurl) You will notice a line in extconf.rb

Make sure the cURL library is installed.

have_library("curl")

this basically makes sure that when you compile, curl can be found and linked. When running extconf.rb if you see a line like this
checking for curl... yes
this means you will be good to go when you run make

after building you can check and make sure libcurl is linked to your extension by typing in
otool -L fileDownloader.bundle

I have been working on a plugin to upload and download files to a webserver through http requests. I found this project on the forums a while ago but It wasn't working.

https://github.com/danawoodman/google-sketchup-file-downloader

Now I have it working and the C Extension compiled fine in Os X.

I have been trying to figure out how to compile it in Windows now so that the plugin can be cross-platform. I started reading this thread but its kind of confusing for me. After following the instructions in this project (which I think are a product of this thread)

https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/sketchup-ruby-c-extension/

I can compile the example code here with extconf.rb and nmake. However compiling dana's extension is a bit more complicated because it links to libcurl.

there is a line in extconf.rb to check for curllib

Make sure the cURL library is installed.

have_library("curl")

its not

checking for main() in curl.lib... no
creating Makefile

So when using nmake I get this error

fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'curl/types.h': No such file or directory

I downloaded libcurl(curl-7.26.0-devel-mingw64, im on windows 7 and not sure which is the best)

So I can't figure out how to tell nmake to include the path, or where it looks for these files.

Does anyone have experience making ruby c extensions on windows and know how to include 3rd party libraries?

Any help would be appreciated.

I agree, I think using curl from a c extension is the only way to do this. I don't think anyone has figured it out. The closest thing I have found is Dana Woodman's extension -

https://github.com/danawoodman/google-sketchup-file-downloader

I recently asked him about the status of this project and he replied.

"At this point it is abandoned. We were having some successes with it but as far as I remember it was failing with SketchUp. If you want to dive in and play around, feel free!"

I am going to pick this project up with the free time I have but I am curious if anyone else has attempted this and actually gotten it to work in Sketchup?

I am also looking for the same thing, has anyone cracked this problem yet?

Sorry for the late reply.

So basicly what I want to do is upload files to and from a restful api using multipart/form data that are not in sketchup format.
ie, export obj file > upload to server > delete obj file
or
download stl file > import to sketchup > delete stl file

after giving up on net stuff through ruby which all seemed to crash sketchup I started looking into accomplishing this through the web dialog with ajax. While it works for communicating with the api in other ways and solves a lot of my problems. It is still not possible to upload or download a file with out the file dialog (and for good reason) but I want something more seamless. So far the closest thing I have found is

https://github.com/danawoodman/google-sketchup-file-downloader

but it isn't working. Thanks for your help, I will keep at it and appreciate any more help
Thanks!

I am interested in using open-uri to read models directly from the internet and then import them into sketchup. I followed the instructions on this forum about swapping the ruby dll in the sketchup folder and I installed Dan's loadpaths.rb and can require 'open-uri' and the rest of ruby core/libraries. However as soon as I make use of it Sketchup crashes. I have tried ruby 187 and 186, with binary and ascii with no luck, does this happen for everyone else?

<span class="syntaxdefault"></span><span class="syntaxkeyword">require&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxstring">'sketchup'<br /></span><span class="syntaxkeyword">require&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxstring">'open-uri'<br /><br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">open</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(</span><span class="syntaxstring">"http://www.ruby-lang.org/"</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)&nbsp;{|</span><span class="syntaxdefault">f</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">|<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">f</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">each_line&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">{|</span><span class="syntaxdefault">line</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">|&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">p&nbsp;line</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">}<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;}&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault"></span>