Hi, sorry about the delayed response. One important thing about the current SDK is that it cannot work with the in-memory model that's live in SketchUp, it can only open existing skp files. So you'll have get the file saved first.

Here are some answers to your questions. For the ones I skipped, it means we should be able to do it.

@th3lurker said:

4b. I used to create new faces using a mesh(because of speed issues), but this poses several problems. The face does not "exist" until i use fill faces from mesh, so i have to store the texture information separately. Fill from mesh erases all entities that existed previously in the group, so i have to wait until i am sure i have no more faces to add to the mesh. Could i use SUFaceCreate instead? Like i said, speed is an issue here, some of out projects have thousands of entities, and 10+ faces/ entity is not uncommon.

Yes, you can use SUFaceCreate but using meshes (i.e. SUGeometryInput*) is currently the only way to map textures due to various reasons. We are looking into adding that to individual faces as well.

@th3lurker said:

Locking the group is not that important

We do not support locking groups yet. I'll make a note.

@th3lurker said:

Are the .skp's backwards compatible?(sketchup8, maybe even 7, i have no real idea what
the clients use).

We currently save only in the 2013 format. It's on our list to be able to save in older formats.

Thanks!

You wouldn't need the Pro version - free would work.

The SketchUp/Ruby side of this won't be too hard. You could simply poll for changes in a file, read in the instructions, draw things, and export an image file from a SU plugin.

As far as the server goes, if you do not have one setup you could try installing like wamp on your local machine for testing.

Sorry, i was away for a few days. No, i don't have the time at the moment to post code, but i basically goes like this. I'll use Floor 0/ Wall 1/ Window/ Left Window Frame as an example.
I have no idea how many volumes will be added to Left Window Frame until i have completed reading the file. This is important because entities.fill_from_mesh erases everything in the entity it is called from. So i create two "parallel" tree structures, one containing the groups (EG:Floor 0/ Wall 1/ Window/ Left Window Frame &Floor 0/ Wall 1/ Window/ Right Window Frame) and another containing the mesh, texture data for each face, other stuff and a "pointer" to the group this is supposed to go in to. When i finished reading all the data i start using it and create and fill each group.entities with the mesh, then i apply the information to the textures. The most timeconsuming in this is, by far, entities.add_group, taking up to a full 0.5 seconds when the number of groups jumps past 1500. I was hoping i could create an empty project with ~2000 empty groups, which i could just juggle around to create the exact tree stucture i need. There is no "stardard" tree structure for any of our projects, a wall might contain none or dozens of windows.
I also understood that the c++ sketchup sdk is no longer supported, so we didn't take the risk to invest time in that.

Just keep in mind that if you start attaching data to every Entity, you'll have massive file bloat.

Success

I let the explode do the intersect ...

model = Sketchup.active_model ents = model.active_entities pt1 = Geom;;Point3d.new 0,0,0 pt2 = Geom;;Point3d.new 10,0,0 pt3 = Geom;;Point3d.new 10,10,0 pt4 = Geom;;Point3d.new 0,10,0 pt5 = Geom;;Point3d.new 1,1,0 pt6 = Geom;;Point3d.new 9,1,0 pt7 = Geom;;Point3d.new 9,9,0 pt8 = Geom;;Point3d.new 1,9,0 mesh1 = Geom;;PolygonMesh.new mesh1.add_polygon pt1,pt2,pt3,pt4 mesh2 = Geom;;PolygonMesh.new mesh2.add_polygon pt5,pt6,pt7,pt8 grp = ents.add_group gents = grp.entities gents.add_faces_from_mesh( mesh1 ) grp2 = gents.add_group # nested group grp2.entities.add_faces_from_mesh( mesh2 ) # holeface = grp2.entities.to_a.find_all{|e| e.is_a?(Sketchup;;Face)} grp2.entities.erase_entities( holeface ) holeface = nil # so it's not pointing at a deleted entity holeloop = grp2.entities.to_a grp2.explode # merge with parent group togo = [] grp.entities.to_a.each{|e| if e.is_a?(Sketchup;;Face) && e.edges == holeloop togo << e end } grp.entities.erase_entities( togo ) grp2 = togo = nil # GC

Nope, no checkboxes built into the SketchUp ruby interface. You would have to make a webpage that acts as the layer manager. Then you can do checkboxes no problem.

Thank you Chris.
Well since it's in inches i'm going to have to use the .mm type of commands. I don't care/need to know what template the user uses, it's just operations would have been simpler.