Plugin Examples incl. DUI example

[birty]

i think ron said that it would be added (/may have already been added) to the treescript plugin

[Ron]

This has not been added yet. I'll see how much work this is and decide if we can do it for the 4.0 release.

[Rob H]

And what about the Delphi header files?

[Ron]

Sorry I know I've been draggin my feet on this one. It's not a fun job maintaining my headers, the headers for the dev kit and the C headers.

[m1duckett]

First: Excellent excellent product and manual!

I was able to convert my plugin over to the DUI in a matter of hours and I was able to remove the Win32 GUI code from the plugin.

Couple comments:

Why is TCommand.Action.iValue[1..3] and TCommand.Action.bValue[1..3] a PCHAR data type? Can they not be ints and bools?

I am not sure I get a feel for how the designed form will show up in the panel without a bit of trial and error. Are there visual cues in the designer I am missing?

Second, the DUI provides much much power and flexibility. Are you planning on defining any best practices in implementing plugin forms? For example, should the plugin add its own group or stick actions in another group? Should one create one action with edits or create multiple actions but no edits.

Is there a way to rename a command on the GML tree from within the action form? Versus selecting "rename" on the tree?

How do you get the Logger to log the plugin messages? The logger tab has a finite list of devices to log from.

Finally, will you be adding data structure details to the manual (i.e. TCommand, TAction, etc...) The header file is pretty intuitive, but docs are nice to describe any nuances.

-Mike

[Ron]

> First: Excellent excellent product and manual!

Thanks.

> I was able to convert my plugin over to the DUI in a matter of hours and I was able to remove the Win32 GUI code from the plugin.

Great!!

> Couple comments:

> Why is TCommand.Action.iValue[1..3] and TCommand.Action.bValue[1..3] a PCHAR data type? Can they not be ints and bools?


In Girder 3 these were actually bools and integers. However this had the limitation that none of these fields could hold
variables names where sometimes you would like to put in variables. Thus in Girder 4 we kept the field names but switched them
to PCHARS so we can have variables anywhere.


> I am not sure I get a feel for how the designed form will show up in the panel without a bit of trial and error. Are there visual cues in the designer I am missing?


It should look pretty much the same expect for some of the composite controls which are represented as a button due to some issues
with dragging composite controls.


> Second, the DUI provides much much power and flexibility. Are you planning on defining any best practices in implementing plugin forms? For example, should the plugin add its own group or stick actions in another group? Should one create one action with edits or create multiple actions but no edits.


Yes we are. There is a Misc. group for random actions, if you exports a couple of actions then put them into their own group.
If your action fits into one of the predefined groups then by all means place them there.

> Is there a way to rename a command on the GML tree from within the action form? Versus selecting "rename" on the tree?


No, personally I think the plugin should not be able to do this.


> How do you get the Logger to log the plugin messages? The logger tab has a finite list of devices to log from.


GirderLogMessageEx( <PCHAR PLUGINNAME>, <PCHAR MESSAGE>, <int ICON>);

GirderLogMessageEx( PLUGINNAME, "Something great happened here", GLM_GOOD_ICON);

> Finally, will you be adding data structure details to the manual (i.e. TCommand, TAction, etc...) The header file is pretty intuitive, but docs are nice to describe any nuances.

I am sure we will :-)

[m1duckett]

> How do you get the Logger to log the plugin messages? The logger tab has a finite list of devices to log from.


GirderLogMessageEx( <PCHAR PLUGINNAME>, <PCHAR MESSAGE>, <int ICON>);

GirderLogMessageEx( PLUGINNAME, "Something great happened here", GLM_GOOD_ICON);

Yep, I got that in the code... trouble is I do not see the logger messages in the output window. I thought maybe the logger plugin setup tab needed my plugin to show up in the list of things to log, but it doesn't. So I am confused as to why the log messages are not showing up.

[Ron]

That is very weird they should show up. Send me your plugin, so I can run it here.

[Ron]

updated examples to use new DUI system.

[dj212]

very nice...vb/dephi stuff