Editing toolbar tooltips on the fly

Developers Ruby API
1

As with most extensions, I create toolbars with tooltips at initial load. Typically each command is created and a tooltip assigned is code like this:

cmd = UI::Command.new(“mycommandA”) { Sketchup::active_model.select_tool self.mycomandA }
cmd.tooltip = “My commandA tool tip”

Typically I reuse the “cmd” variable multiple times, once for each command.

But if I want to change the tool tip later depending on circumstances or settings changes, what do I do?. I see no way to refer to an existing command by name.

I could of course at load time make each “cmd” a unique class variable as in “@@cmdA”, so I could refer to it later. But I’m wondering if there is a way to refer to an existing command by name?

2

That would require to enforce a name is a unique identifier, before you could lookup commands by string.

The actual problem you have is managing references and referencing a command in some way later. That means you would a) just not reuse the variable but use different variables for different commands and b) use a persistent reference that is not garbage collected (instead of a local variable).
(Whether that is a class variable or constant is an implementation detail.)

As far as I remember, button tooltips can not be changed later once the command has been added to the GUI.

3

Yes they can, as well as status text. I do it all the time. Works on Windows at least. (It is the menu text that you cannot change.)

EDIT: This is a very old topic thread. There have been multiple GUI updates since this was posted. The 2016 update that added trays & panels on Windows may have disallowed changes to button tooltips. Later SketchUp 2023 began the migration to using the Qt GUI framework. So, take what was said here “with a grain of salt” to use a metaphor.

Here is an example of using hashes (and avoiding the cmd local reference altogether):

module Author
  module SomePlugin
  
    DIR = File.dirname(__FILE__)

    COMMANDS  = {} unless defined?(COMMANDS)
    
    MENUCHECK = {} unless defined?(MENUCHECK)
    MENU_TEXT = {} unless defined?(MENU_TEXT)
    
    TOOLTIP_ON  = {} unless defined?(TOOLTIP_ON)
    TOOLTIP_OFF = {} unless defined?(TOOLTIP_OFF)

    STATUS_TEXT_ON  = {} unless defined?(STATUS_TEXT_ON)
    STATUS_TEXT_OFF = {} unless defined?(STATUS_TEXT_OFF)

    ###  Text containing hashes are loaded from Language files
    ###  here, based upon return value of Sketchup::get_locale()
    
    if COMMANDS[:some_nifty_name].nil?

      MENUCHECK[:some_nifty_name]= MF_UNCHECKED

      COMMANDS[:some_nifty_name]= UI::Command::new('X']) {
      
        some_nifty_method()
        
      }.instance_eval {
      
        set_validation_proc { MENUCHECK[:some_nifty_name] }

        menu_text= MENU_TEXT[:some_nifty_name]

        status_bar_text= STATUS_TEXT_OFF[:some_nifty_name]
        tooltip= TOOLTIP_OFF[:some_nifty_name]
        
        small_icon= File.join(DIR,'images/nifty_16.png')
        large_icon= File.join(DIR,'images/nifty_24.png')
      
      }

    end

    if COMMANDS[:another_command].nil?
    
      # Same kind of code but for another command.

    end

  end
end

It also means a command can be accessed from outside like:

Author::SomePlugin::COMMANDS[:some_nifty_name]

which would have advantages for say a WebDialog based custom toolbar maker (like Aerilius’.)