3D PLM Enterprise Architecture

Integrating Your Commands

To make your brand new commands available to your customers, you need to integrate them into one of the following objects:

• A workbench: your commands will be available as long as this workbench is the active one. You can either create a new workbench, or modify an existing one. In this case, you should be able to modify the workbench source files
• An add-in to either a workshop or a workbench, allowing you to add your commands without modifying the workshop or the workbench. Creating an add-in makes you fully independent from the workshop or the workbench provider, and protects your commands from future workshop or workbench evolutions. You can also modify an existing add-in, providing you can modify its source files. The add-in and the commands it contains are available with the workshop or the workbench.

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Into a Workbench

You can either create a new workbench or modify a existing one.

• To create a new workbench for you  commands, refer to the example [2]
• To integrate your commands into an existing workbench, you need to do the following:
  1. Decide where you want to integrate your commands: in which menus and possibly which submenus, in which toolbars and possibly in which icon boxes, and at which locations with respect to the other existing  commands
  2. Create one or several command header classes, or reuse existing ones you have already created for your workbench
  3. Modify the CreateCommands method of the workbench class to add your command header instantiations
  4. Modify the CreateWorkbench method to create the command starters and put them in the menus, submenus, toolbars, and icon boxes you choose
  5. Rebuild the workbench shared libraries and DLLs using mkmk
  6. Modify the command header resource files to add the resources you commands will use to display and provide help, such as the menu item titles, the icons for the toolbars, the various help messages, the accelerators and mnemonics, and so forth.

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Into an Add-in

Because you are not their provider, or because you don't want to modify them, you may prefer to remain independent from the workshop or from the workbench into which you intend to integrate your  commands. In this case, the add-in is the solution. You can either create a new add-in, or modify a existing one.

• To create an add-in for your  commands, refer to the example [3]
• To integrate your  commands into an existing add-in, you need to do the following:
  1. Decide in which toolbars of the add-in you want to integrate your  commands. Remember that you can neither create nor modify a menu or a submenu in an add-in
  2. Create one or several command header classes, or reuse existing ones
  3. Modify the CreateCommands method of the add-in class to add your command header instantiations
  4. Modify the CreateToolbars method to create the command starters and put them in the toolbars you choose
  5. Rebuild the add-in shared libraries and DLLs
  6. Modify the command header resource files to add the resources your commands will use to display and provide help, such as the icons for the toolbars, the various help messages, the accelerators and mnemonics, and so forth.

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Into the Warm Start Mechanism

If your command modifies the contents of a V5 document, you should ensure its warm start integration. Refer to the technical article entitled "Warm Start Incremental Backup" [3].

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Integrating a Script as a  Command

You can easily customize your toolbars by adding icons to trigger your favorite macros. This reduces the macro access time for the macros you often run.

	This task explains how to add a macro as a command in a toolbar.
	1. On the Tools menu, point to Macro, and then click Macros. Click Select to select the macro you want to add to make sure that the directory path of the file containing the requested macro is concatenated with those recognized by the application. Then click Cancel.
	2. On the Tools menu, click Customize, and then click the Commands tab. In the Categories list, click Macros. Drag the macro name and drop it onto the toolbar you wish. The default icon is used
	3. To select another icon than the default one, click Show Properties, and click to display the Icons Browser  box.
	4. Click the appropriate icon. The default icon changes to the one clicked.

The macro is now ready to use from the toolbar.

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In Short

To make your command available to your customers, you need to integrate it into a workbench, or an add-in. You can also add scripts as commands in toolbars.

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References

History

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