Okay, it looks like I'm getting close to what I want with the Export CI ID plugin :
http://www.scriptspot.com/sketchup/scripts/export-ci-id
Now to figure out a quick way of hiding everything not selected as I loop through.
Thanks again for the help here - I am appreciative.
Regards,
Matt

Hi TIG,
Thank you for your reply and the code snippet. As written I got a couple of errors, so I changed the middle section of what you provided to this

until ((parent==model) || (parent==nil)) #MattC dats << parent.name if parent.class==Sketchup::ComponentDefinition if parent.instances[0] != nil #MattC parent=parent.instances[0].parent #MattC fix typo else #MattC parent=nil #MattC end #MattC end#until

and this gets me the list hierarchy I was looking for. Dunno if I missed something else - there's certainly got to be a better way than what I wrote - but this seems to traverse the component tree.

At the risk of prolonging this thread, can you suggest where I want to add code to "select" a component? I was working on looping through entities like this
if (an_entity.typename == 'ComponentInstance') component_name = an_entity.definition.name puts(" Dealing with : " + component_name) status = our_selection.add an_entity #select it curritem = our_selection[0] if (curritem) puts(" Selected entity = " + curritem.name); else puts(" Some error") end UI.messagebox(component_name + " should be selected. ") subcomponents = curritem.explode #some recursion to to work down through the component status = our_selection.remove curritem #need to reassemble component here???? end
hopting that the "Attribute Reporter" (attrreporter.rb) plugin could serve as a guide. But I'm getting stuck at the drill-down-and-reassemble point. Your approach would seem to naturally work better. Is there a plugin out there that you know of which you could point me to as a guide?

(My end goal is to loop through a model to show different views of each component, for what it's worth.)

I appreciate the help you've given on this - thanks!
Matt

Hi,
I am trying to write a plugin to loop through the components in a model and display the unique name for each item. I've been through the "Hello World" example and reviewed other example plugins.

In my example, I have a model with three components, each of which is comprised of a couple of sub-components. E.g.
A
a1
a2
B
b1
C
c1
c2
c3

If I do this (omitting the requisite definition statements earlier in the code)
for i in 0..(component_definitions.length) if component_definitions[i] != NIL #UI.messagebox("Item " + i.to_s + " : " + component_definitions[i].name) end end
I'll get a list of all the component names. If I specify "entities" instead of "component_definitions", then I correctly get a list of 3 items (though ".name" is not a valid qualifier).

Can someone point me to a bit of code or a resource which would show me how to print out the full name of a component (e.g. A.a1, C.c3, etc.)? My goal is to be able to loop through the model, showing only one component at a time while hiding all the rest. If this (or something similar) has already been done and I could be pointed to that, I'd be appreciative.

Finally, I'm new to this forum. I hope the above is appropriately phrased and that this is the right spot for the question. If I've made any newbie error, I apologize in advance.
Regards,
Matt