CLF Extended Views in 2018 Not Working

For the past few years I have been using the CLF Extended View Extension to quickly and easily give me positions to export JPEGs of the models from.

I have recently upgraded SketchUp to 2018 and it seems that it is no longer working. Anytime I press one of the buttons, I just get some guide points in the shape of a box.

It’s not the biggest of problems because I can do the same thing the long way around, but the app sure was handy to have.

Any ideas, anyone?

Richard

If you say it does half the action (create guide points) and silently fails, have you opened the Ruby Console (before clicking the button) to see if it prints an exception that gives more information?

Hi there,

I have not - I’ve not had a massive amount to do with the Ruby console, but I’ll give it a look at and get back to you.

Rich

Ok, so it gives me this error:

Error: #<TypeError: reference to deleted ConstructionPoint>
C:/Users/User/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2018/SketchUp/Plugins/clf_extended_views/clf_extended_views_data.rb:54:in position' C:/Users/User/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2018/SketchUp/Plugins/clf_extended_views/clf_extended_views_data.rb:54:in main’
C:/Users/User/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2018/SketchUp/Plugins/clf_extended_views/clf_extended_views_menus.rb:34:in block in <module:CLF_Extensions_NS>' SketchUp:1:in call’

I’m not sure if it’s missing something, or referencing something that isn’t there.

It was one of the earliest extensions. It is possibly a bug in the RubyAPI or in the extension: It creates temporary construction points in a group, explodes the group and then accesses their position. In previous versions of SketchUp, entities from exploded groups preserved their references. This is apparently not anymore the case and the entities that are now merged into the parent group have different references. The extension does not really need to create temporary geometry but could use transformations (model.edit_transform) to compute the position and orientation of the new cameras. Then it would also not add multiple operations to the undo stack.

You could either contact the author, Chris, whether he can update the extension (he is now master of extensibility) or try to find a similar extension on Extension Warehouse.

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Curses

Ok, thank you very much for your help.

Rich

It’s failing because of the way the Ruby API now deals with gui and exploded groups etc.
Previously you could add a cpoint [guide] into a group and get a reference to it, then when you exploded the group that cpoint could still be accessed via the reference to it.
Changes in the way the nested references now work, mean that when you explode a group its entities’ references are lost because they are effectively deleted and recreated in the new context, and these new ones get new references. Thus the error about reference to deleted cpoint etc…
When you explode a group it returns an array of the exploded entities, so you can ‘grep’ the output to collect all such cpoints.
If you want specific cpoints remembered in their ‘order’ then you need to add a unique attribute to the cpoint, then retrieve it from the grepped list…

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