Selecting Specific Entity, Group or Component (By Name)

Developers Ruby API
12

Very similar for groups, because groups are disguised components.
That means they have definitions. And their definitions have a separate name attribute, than the group instances.

But there are a few quirks. The group.description method is an wrapper for group.definition.description. (So like a component instance, they share their definition’s description attribute.)

So to find groups through the definition list, we need to filter out the definitions for images and normal components.

dlist = Sketchup.active_model.definitions
grps = dlist.find_all {|d| d.group? }
return if grps.empty? # test for empty array (not found)
  
gdef = grps.find {|d| d.name == "PocketDoor" }
if gdef # test for nil (not found)
  if !gdef.instances.empty?
    gdef.instances.find {|i| i.name == "PocketDoor - Master Bath" }
  else
    nil
  end
end

OK?

But you can also simplify the code by combining boolean arguments in the find and find_all blocks, and other test expressions:

dlist = Sketchup.active_model.definitions
gdef = dlist.find {|d| d.group? && d.name == "PocketDoor" }
if gdef && !gdef.instances.empty?
  gdef.instances.find {|i| i.name == "PocketDoor - Master Bath" }
else
  return nil
end

The find iterator will return nil if no match is found. (But be careful, as the find_all iterator always returns an array, so it will be an empty array if no matches are found.)

So to wrap it up in a method:

def find_group_by_name(
  definition_name = "Group#1",
  instance_name   = ""
)
  #
  if !definition_name.is_a?(String) || !instance_name.is_a?(String)
    raise(TypeError,"String arguments required.",caller)
  end
  #
  dlist = Sketchup.active_model.definitions
  gdef = dlist.find {|d| d.group? && d.name == definition_name }
  if gdef && !gdef.instances.empty?
    gdef.instances.find {|i| i.name == instance_name }
  else
    return nil
  end
  #
end ###
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