One way to handle this might be to create a "template" DC that is shared on the 3dwarehouse and contains all of the "standard" attributes for a given industry. If you going to create, say, a window, then you grab that template and build your window inside of it.

The really hard part is getting a standard that covers everyone's needs while also being relatively simple. Ideally, it would be best to find an existing data standard to follow rather than create our own, but we may find that it's more practical to create smaller, simpler subsets of these giant standards.

I like the idea, but I'm not an architect so I don't know what more to say, except that the SketchUp team would be happy to entertain proposals for establishing lists on our website or collections on the 3d warehouse for this kind of thing.

@billw said:

For Google Sketchup guys
It would be nice if there was a way of clicking on the Component Options - image which could take you to a manufacturers web site. Perhaps a new parameter Form Design > URL

Although, it looks like (from the docs) an URL can be embedded in the description/summary fields with
<a href="http://www.google.com">

Yeah, that's the current path: add a link inside your description tag. In general, we didn't want to allow links on anything that doesn't look like a link, which is why the image isn't linkable. That being said, I've added your request to our feature list for discussion.

A sidenote: since we pull the imageURL's image from your webserver, one could use this get a rough approximation of how many people are downloading your DCs from the 3dwarehouse and configuring them by watching your traffic logs.

Cheers,

This one was a point of much argument around here during the design stage. On one hand, you should be able to mirror things like SU does so nicely. On another, negative lengths don't make sense to a lot of people. So the compromise was to use all positive lengths, but to respect any "mirrored" state that was manually applied.

See the attached model. Use the Component Options window to change the width of a couple of subparts, one of which is mirrored. Note that LENX of both of them is reported in the positive, even though one is flipped.

So that's the way to do it: flip your component manually as you need, then code formulas to control its LENs.

SmartCouch_withMirroredParts.skp

Alan,

That's a bug. I've filed it and am poking around to see how your model got into this state.

The workaround is to add a formula at the top level that keeps the LENX, LENY, and LENZ attributes fixed. See the attached model for the fix. All I did was add a formula into each of those attributes, and now it works.

NOTE: If you see this sort of thing happen again, it is because SketchUp has forgotten the correct size of the component after it's animated. A hacky trick to force a "refresh" of the component size is to double click down into edit mode of each of your subcomponents. The act of entering component edit mode forces a refresh of the cached component size.

Cheers,

barriers_constrained.skp

Hey Dhruv,

Just to add some "official" notes to your question:

There is no way (currently) to open URLs from an onclick interaction because of security/privacy concerns. We didn't want people spamming you with nasty website links that launch in your browser without you even knowing that a link was coming.

What we do allow is for html links that originate from inside the Component Options window. Just add something like this to your "description" attribute:

Click here to <a href="http://mysite.com">Visit my site</a>.

Then anyone selecting your component while the Component Options window is open will see your link.

It's not as sexy or simple as how you're requesting, but it provides that buffer that we felt was important... if you click on the link you don't know where it's taking you, but at least you knew it was a link.

One other (nerdy) option I'll throw into the suggestion pile:

Whenever a DC's attributes are edited by a pro user via the component attributes window, we timestamp that interaction via an attribute called dynamic_attributes._lastmodified. If you are a Ruby coder (or want to hire one from the Ruby forum), you could create a "Generate Purchase Order from Drawing" script that not only creates the order form for the panel manufacturer based on the configured DCs, but also checks to see that the timestamp attached to each DC is identical to the "official" version. If someone modified your DCs, you could at least tell that this had occurred.

Please keep us informed of these kinds of objections from your manufacturer clients! We are very aware that there will be some companies that dislike the idea of sharing their "secret configuration sauce" with the pro users, but our assumption is that there will be some middle ground where there could be DCs that are "configurable enough" to share with sales-level people without giving away the manufacturing process. (For example, would your client be more interested in SketchUp as a sales platform if the DCs they released didn't show every drilled hole but only showed gross geometry?)

Anyway, I'm very interested in feedback like this -- we are listening!

Hey Sella,

When you go to the Help Center article, what exact URL does it try to send you to that you get the 404 error?

BTM,

Ah, there's a snippet of code in the .rb file that detects if you're on a mac, but it was added back when the mac/su6 had WebDialog errors that are fixed in 7.

I'll need to test on my Mac with SU7 and post a fixed version.

@azuby said:

Oh, its not a Sketchup observer, its my own one. You know, porgramming design pattern and such things

azuby

Ah,

Well, if you feel motivated to create a minimal use case that causes the crash, I could hunt it down. I'd also consider upgrading to SU7 and seeing if that fixes the crash. We did improve stability in a variety of places around the Ruby API. Thanks!

What kind of animations do you want to build? Are we talking about character animations?

Hey guys,

Support for the ^ operator is on our feature request list, but for now you have to do the math yourself. Let me know if you find any other "standard" spreadsheet operators that should be added to DCs.

@remus said:

So essentially what you think is happening is rand is being evaluated several times and giving several different values?

Seems to fit the evidence, it'll be interesting to hear what the official line is.

Remus,

This is exactly what is happening. Whenever a reference to a "randomized" cell is made, the random function is refired. I'm happy to hear opinions on whether this behavior is "right" or not.

What kind of observer is in play here?

I'm not remembering any WebDialog crashes, but there have been observer crashes, particularly on entity observers.

You might want to ask over in the Ruby forum. This is very doable with ruby... but I'm not aware of anyone who has. Maybe you'll inspire someone.

Hey Thomthom,

DCs can't interact directly with text labels in SU, unfortunately.

Do you have a distinct series of steps that can create the "save as" problem?

Hey everyone,

I've finally found the time to assemble a ZIP containing the knight game demo that I presented at Google IO last year. Unzip the contents into your Sketchup Plugins directory, then look for a new menu item under Plugins > Knight Game

<edit>
Too big to upload to the forums, so you can get it here...
http://www.sketchupdemos.com/knightgame.zip
It's about 4mb.
</edit>

This is an example of using a Ruby WebDialog to capture key strokes and control SU in a fun way. You can hear more details from the original preso: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FALvwBN5-hc

Special thanks to Todd Burch for cleaning up the code and adding sound effects! If you could see my original demo code (and you never will!), you'd know why he's my hero. And apologies to the community for taking so long to share.

Cheers,

Al,

Are you on a mac or PC?

@david. said:

It's too bad that the SketchUp team didn't follow through on the UI support within the Ruby API. It's not bad, but it's could be a heck of a lot better.

This is a good point. On one hand, you could argue that WebDialogs are the answer to complex UI inside SU, but in practice I think it's hard to find developers who are experts at ruby AND html AND javascript, which is largely what's needed to create solid UI inside a webdialog.

If people have seen any UI APIs that are worth looking at as a potential model for how we could extend Ruby UI support, please let me know.

@jim said:

Something I have been wanting to do is write a suite of general-purpose Observers based on the built-in ones.

This is a fantastic idea. Attaching observers reliably to every component instance, for example, is challenging. So a helper script is one approach... another would be to create some uber-observers at the Sketchup level. Obviously, there are potential performance concerns with any of these.

Have people seen any errors from other ways that scripts mess with each other besides naming overlaps? For example, observers from script A are messing with the model before my observers from script B fire off?