Lesson 1: Ruby Console

The Ruby console is similar in functionality to Ruby's Interactive Ruby (irb) allowing you to experiment with Ruby commands and methods. This is a valuable tool for exploring the API and debugging your scripts. If you aspire to be a SketchUp plugins programmer, then getting familiar with the console is a good place to start.

In this tutorial we'll show you how to get to it and enter our first API commands.

Try this!

• 1. Start SketchUp or SketchUp Pro.

  2. Open the Ruby Console (Window > Ruby Console).

  3. Type the following in the text input field at the bottom of the console:

     1. UI.beep

  4. This command invokes the beep method of the UI module to play a warning beep.

  5. Type the following in the text input field:

• • 1. UI.messagebox("Hello World")

• 6. Type the following in the text input field to draw a line in SketchUp (TYPE ONE LINE OF TEXT AT A TIME! Press the Enter or Return key after each line).

• • 1. pt1 = [0, 0, 0]

    2. pt2 = [10, 10, 0]

    3. model = Sketchup.active_model

    4. model.entities.add_line(pt1, pt2)

    5. The first line defines a variable called pt1 (point one) and assigns it an array of three values [0,0,0]. This is the starting Point3d for the line that will be drawn.

    6. The second line defines a variable called pt2 (point two) and assigns it an array of three values [10,10,0]. This is the ending Point3d for the line that will be drawn.

    7. The third line defines a variable which receives a reference to the currently active Model.

    8. The fourth line adds a Edge entity (from pt1 to pt2) to the currently active model. Go zoom in on the origin of your drawing and you should see our line:

Extra Credit:

1. Try adding more edges. Can you draw a square out of them? Can you draw a cube? HINT: Press the up arrow to "get back" to earlier commands.

2. So what about faces? Try typing in the following lines. Again, one line at a time:

   1. model = Sketchup.active_model

   2. model.entities.add_face([0,0,0], [9,0,0], [9,0,9], [0,0,9])

3. Try UI.openURL to take the user to the Trimble homepage. HINT: You need to pass this method a string URL, something like UI.openURL("http://www.trimble.com") Can you make it go to your favorite website?

4. Try typing arithmetic, like (5+5) * 100

5. Try assigning some variables. Type in each of these lines in order. Can you guess what the messagbox will show?

• 1. a = 4.0 b = 5.0 c = a * b UI.messagebox(c)