Manufacturing DevBlog

F1 help for Ribbon buttons

By Adam Nagy

When the user hovers over a Ribbon button, then if the tooltip is progressive (i.e. provides an expanded description that shows only after a couple of seconds) then a message at the bottom of that notifies the user that the help information for that button can be envoked by pressing F1 while the tooltip is showing. You can set this up through the API for your own buttons as well.
Note: this F1 functionality works for the tooltip even if that is not progressive.

You just need to handle the ButtonDefinition's OnHelp event. I modified the SimpleAddIn sample project's DrawSlotButton.cs file with the following code which also adds extended help: 

public DrawSlotButton(

  string displayName, string internalName,

  CommandTypesEnum commandType, string clientId, string description,

  string tooltip, Icon standardIcon, Icon largeIcon,

  ButtonDisplayEnum buttonDisplayType)

  : base(

    displayName, internalName, commandType, clientId,

    description, tooltip, standardIcon, largeIcon, buttonDisplayType)

{

  base.ButtonDefinition.OnHelp +=

    new ButtonDefinitionSink_OnHelpEventHandler(

      ButtonDefinition_OnHelp);

 

  base.ButtonDefinition.ProgressiveToolTip.Title =

    "Additional Help";

  base.ButtonDefinition.ProgressiveToolTip.ExpandedDescription =

    "Additional description. Progressive tooltip is " +

    "not needed for the F1 help to work";

}

 

void ButtonDefinition_OnHelp(

  NameValueMap Context, out HandlingCodeEnum HandlingCode)

{

  HandlingCode = HandlingCodeEnum.kEventHandled;

 

  // Show the webpage with the help of the current

  // Ribbon button

  // System.Diagnostics.Process is being used here

  Process.Start("http://www.autodesk.com");

}

 

Autodesk Fusion 360 Meetup in San Francisco

By Philippe Leefsma

Have you been wondering what Fusion 360 is all about? If you are in the Bay area, now is your chance to find out. The San Francisco Fusion 360 Meetup group is holding a Meetup the evening of Thursday, August 21st at Pier 9. Lots of networking, food, beverages, lively presentations and awesome demos from Autodesk and Fusion 360 community members.

Sign up here to stay in touch or attend the event. Oh, did I mention? Free beer!

An online event with an opportunity to receive up to US $100 per app published and win one of eight iPad minis!

By Virupaksha Aithal

We are excited to announce the 2014 Autodesk® Exchange Apps Hackathon. While similar in concept to the Portathon that we held in 2013, this event is bigger, better, has new competitions and great prizes. Anyone can participate from anywhere in the world and at any time both before the event and during the Hackathon days. We’ve assembled a great line up of speakers to give presentations and demos on hot topics that will help your overall app development and technical experts will be on hand to help and guide you.

The Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon is a virtual web based Hackathon.  It’s a community event that gives you the opportunity to work closely with other members of the software development community and Autodesk engineers — in real time, developing new apps for Autodesk Exchange. 

The Hackathon will run from 9:00 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time (PT) on Saturday, September 20, 2014 to 4 p.m. PT on September 21, 2014. You can participate from anywhere you have internet access.  

The Hackathon is a free event.  Plus, there is a reward!  For all new apps submitted to the Autodesk Exchange Apps store by midnight on September 30, 2014 and accepted for publication in the store by November 30, 2014, you will receive US$ 100 per “non-Free” app and US $50 “Free or Trial” app for up to 5 apps per company.

More Information and Registration:

Head on over to exchangeapphack.com for details on the event, including a FAQ, the schedule and speaker line up, the Rules and the Registration link.

If you have any questions about the Hackathon or the Cloud Apps and Sustainability Apps competitions, please send an email to [email protected]. 

Debug iLogic code

By Adam Nagy

Unfortunately, in iLogic you do not have the same features you get in case of VBA or Visual Studio projects. Stepping through the code, checking variable values, setting up breakpoints are all missing from the iLogic environment.

If the iLogic functionality is not enough and you also need to access the underlying Inventor API, then I think the easiest way is to test things out in VBA. There you can also get familiar with the object model by examining the properties of existing objects: http://adndevblog.typepad.com/manufacturing/2013/10/discover-object-model.html

One way to debug iLogic code could be using Trace calls, which can write out information about where the code is at a given moment and what the values of certain variables are. This was mentioned on the forum: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Inventor-General-Discussion/iLogic-Developing-and-debugging/m-p/2850580  

I used one of my test documents (Download ILogicTestDebug) and added a couple more rules to it so that I can see which rule is called after which other rule, etc. Just placed Trace calls like these inside the rules:

Trace.WriteLine("iLogic: 'Update' rule start")
Trace.WriteLine("iLogic: 'Width' = " + currentWidth.ToString())

Note: you might need to add Imports System.Diagnostics at the beginning of the rule 

Once I downloaded the DebugView application I could see all my messages in there, along with messages coming from other applications: