Where to find documentation

General documentation

For information about getting licensed to develop plugins, upload and deployment of plugins and general administrative procedures, please refer to the Scapi Home website.

This Developers' Guide contains reference material for every released version of SCAPI.  The front page contains a list of releases and a link to whatever documentation is available. This same list is always available at: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/scapi-guide

Please note that the url: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/scapi-plugin-developers-guide/Survey-Core-Plugin-API
always points to the most recent release. When providing links to documentation, please use this url as the base, rather than a versioned one so the link will remain valid and current.

The guide was previously available offline as a .chm file, and could be found in the Docs subdirectory of the SDK installation from version 1.90 to 21.10. After the 21.10 release, it was necessary to move the documentation to Google's new implementation of Sites and extracting a .chm from there was considered impractical. So, after 21.10 only this online guide that you are currently reading is available.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for a list of downloadable CHM files for previous versions.

The purpose of this guide is to present the API with the stress on how to use it rather than a bare presentation of the classes and their members. The header (.h) files that ship with the SDK are another way to look through the API. Most classes and functions are briefly described in the headers.

Documentation versions, software versions, and packages

SCAPI and its documentation is versioned the same as the Survey Core with which it was released.  Note that a plugin will run with later versions of Survey Core than the version on which the plugin was developed.  In other words, a plugin will not normally require recompilation or re-release when a new version of Survey Core is released by Trimble.

Previous to 21.10, a new version of the Development Guide was created for each significant release of Survey Core, if any API changes were made. Until version 21.10, the offline .CHM file that is installed with the SDK will always match the version of the installation.

Trimble Access is installed as a package, using the Trimble Installation Manager (TIM, or previously TAIM). A package contains a complete set of software components that have been developed and tested to work together, including the TASDK.

For example, the first release of TASDK was part of Trimble Access 2019.00 - the first release in 2019, so the package would typically be labelled TA 2019.00.  Within this package will be Survey Core version 19.00, which will usually be written with a build number, something like v19.00-054.  The version of the SC API would also be 19.00.