Excel VBA - Sketchup API integration

[cintellis.bvba]

Hi there,

I’m thinking of using Sketchup to do some modelling of components whose parameters are stored in Excel. I’d like to make use of Sketchup APIs to create and design Sketchup models out of Excel. Is this possible and where I can I find the references to add to my VBA environment?

Many thanks for your help

Christophe

[Neil_Burkholder]

See here for information about downloading the SDK.

Download SketchUp lastest sdk

I’m c++ developer. I’m creating a c++ project on window to convert skp data to opengl. So a need a download a latest sketchup sdk. I register on sketchup homepage but not have mail confirm. Can you show me how to download sketchup sdk? Thanks a lots.

You will not be able to use the binaries in VBA though. They are not compatible.

Instead you can use the Ruby API inside SketchUp to read the Excel files and draw a model from them.

Reading and writing to Excel from SketchUp is not a trivial task since SketchUp doesn’t really support gems. See here for more info.

Cross-platform Generate xlsx Document

Since this thread is closed I’m creating a new one. In my extension I currently create spreadsheets using WinOLE. There are several reasons I’d like to find an alternative. Excel needs to be installed for this to work. It only works on windows. It is slow because Excel needs to be started. In c# I use ClosedXML which is realy fast, but only works on windows. I’ve done some searching but it seems most of the methods use gems, and installing gems in SketchUp is not something I want to dea…

[DanRathbun]

Why does cxn03651/write_xlsx, Issue 18 say:

write_xlsx cannot read existing xls or xlsx file.

… and File: README — Documentation for xlsx_writer (0.4.4) says at the top of the page:

Writes (doesn’t read or modify) XLSX files.

---

I am trying to find the docs for the newer versions, all I can access is v0.4.4 which does not actually appear in the project Change log.

[Neil_Burkholder]

Did you look here?

[DanRathbun]

Yes I did. Those are the examples, not the Ruby docs for it’s DSL.

And again the description says …

The WriteXLSX rubygem can be used to create an Excel file in the 2007+ XLSX format

There are quite a few methods defined in later versions (that are shown in the examples) that are not documented in the v0.4.4 docs. Some of the method names have changed, etc.

That old version of the docs does not show any iterators of the cell data. There are no dedicated “read” type of methods except the old version had a #value getter for the Cell class. But the newer versions do not seem to define Row and Cell classes.

This project is not being maintained well the last 2 branches and the master are way behind in commits. (Who does 80 commits without releasing a version ?) It’s behind in pull requests as well.

It’s also poorly documented and it appears that all the YARD doc comments have been removed, so it wouldn’t help to run YARD on it.

Add to this that it has a multitude of extra stuff (formatting, drawing etc.) that isn’t needed for simply reading and write data for SketchUp geometry.

[kengey]

The Ruby community isn’t really growing, is it? The web however is growing everyday with well maintained javascript libraries for just about any purpose.

Why I am telling this? Well, you can leverage all those javascript libraries in SketchUp as well by doing all the heavy lifting in Javascript code running in HtmlDialogs and passing data back and forth between ruby and javascript.

Here is a great library for reading and writing xlsx: xlsx - npm

[DanRathbun]

Sure the HTML dialog could be small and display “Reading the spreadsheet file, please wait …”

But here you are complicating the challenge even more because a coder needs to know CSS, HTML, and JavaScript as well as Ruby. (We haven’t established what coding languages @cintellis.bvba knows yet.)

I would think it would be simplest to use the Ruby Standard library’s CSV class to read in a table exported from Excel.

If the xlsx format is familiar to the coder they might use the library’s REXML module, and write a simple iterator to read the table directly from the XML.

[pcmoor]

@DanRathbun

I would think it would be simplestto use the Ruby Standard library’s CSV class to read in a table exported from Excel.

yes, simple first

[MSP_Greg]

@kengey

The Ruby community isn’t really growing, is it?

Depends on your viewpoint. I believe there has been an increase in support from some of the larger companies using Ruby. GitHub, Shopify, etc all have staff contributing to Ruby.

well maintained javascript libraries

node.js libraries != javascript libraries for use in CEF

As to Ruby and Excel, one might look at rubyXL. It requires Nokogiri, which, as most know, is an extension gem, and hence, very difficult to use in SU.

Re write_xlsx:

@DanRathbun

This project is not being maintained well the last 2 branches and the master are way behind in commits. (Who does 80 commits without releasing a version ?) It’s behind in pull requests as well.

Quickly looking at info as you’ve done isn’t a good idea.

Often, the situation that you’ve described occurs when there is a desire to release a new major version with breaking changes. So, PRs/commits are accepted with breaking changes, but more work needs to be done. While that’s happening, there may also be commits that are fixes/bugs/non-breaking changes that warrant another release at the current major version.

Not sure about this particular gem, and the issue of ‘maintainer resources’ may affect things.