Sorting objects by their geometric properties

Developers Ruby API
1

I have no experience creating and sorting multidimensional arrays in Ruby.
So I’m looking for general advice applicable to Sketchup objects.

Example: User has selected 5 component instances A,B,C,D,E.

I first derive n attributes of each: name, X, Y and Z of their origins, width, length and height etc.
So I have a table with 5 rows and n columns.

How can I sort the table by the values in any column?

2

This would be a Ruby feature not a SketchUp API feature.

Read up on the block forms of methods such as min, max, and sort.

You will need to write a method that takes the target column as an argument, then likely uses that to control a implementation of a sort block.

At the most basic, such a method would look similar to this:
(where i is the 0 based column index)

def sort_my_records(i)
  @records.sort! {|a,b|
    a[i] <=> b[i]
  }
end

However, the <=> operator requires the objects referenced to be Comparable, ie if you test their class’s ancestors, the Comparable module will be listed in the result, as one of the class’s ancestors,…
OR they have a <=> method defined for their class.

String should not be a problem, and if your get the x,y and z from Point3d objects, they will return Length objects. Likewise for the h, w & d from BoundingBox.

Length has a special <=> override method defined.
http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/docs/ourdoc/length.php#<=>

Also ref: [url]Class: Array (Ruby 2.0.0)

3

And min and max are in the Enumerable module, which is mixed into Hash and Array, etc.
[url]http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0.0/Enumerable.html[/url]