Call C++ Window Form Indise Maya

[jackyu000]

Hello,

MEL Script alomost provided all the windows UI form you will need. In my case, I want to create a "file brower" (tree list view) and I think MEL Script doesn't provide that kind of function. If I create my windows form with C++, how do I plug it into Maya so I can open the window inside Maya?

[rob-bateman]

sounds like the fileBrowser command. You can create a window inside a C++ plugin, however it'll probably cause maya to crash and/or be incredibly in-efficient and will probably suck big time from the point of view of a user. You can't get access to Maya's main loop, other than by using an idle event, so don't expect it to be very nice to code, and make sure you kill all the script jobs you've created to hack it all together. tbh, it's better just to use mel - doing any GUI in C++ will be non-portable and very messy - it's not what the API is designed for.

[daniel-faust]

The guys from SecretLevel have done this stuff before and have a tutorial on their site:

http://www.secretlevel.com/

Scroll down their main page, on the left side you'll see an image saying "Maya Dev Talk", clicking on it will lead you to a couple of good tutorials, one showing a windows treeview in a mel window/form.

You can get access to Maya's main loop if you set up an event hook, but all of that is hacking maya and can lead to unexpected results.

I've never felt it to be a solid solution, I'm glad I abandoned the idea of embedding windows controls in mel windows/forms. Maybe I'll try it again with .NET if I really need to.

You'll feel better if you just stick to what mel has to offer, on the other hand you'll first need to feel bad by hacking your way around in there. Really, don't do it unless you have a someone paying you to do exactly that.

Another thing is popping up modeless mfc and non-mfc dialogs from a plugin, this has worked for me without problems and without the need of accessing Maya's main loop. Or creating a new thread and popping up a modal dialog from there, that also works.

Anyway, avoid all of the above.

[jackyu000]

Thank your help guys~

It sounds a very hard work. I think I will just stick in MEL Script right now.
I would like to try it in future if my boss would pay me more~

My studio just choosed "Alienbrain" to be our database control system. I am currently work with 2 programmer and 1 consultant who come from Alienbrain to customize our own Alienbrain UI.
Alienbrain offer plugin for maya to open fileBrower. That's why I was curious how to do that.

[daniel-faust]

Hmm... I re-read the thread and it looks I understood it wrong. If you just want to create a window in order to select a file for opening or saving, then use the fileBrowser command. It's not hard to use it from the api, since you can issue MGlobal::executeCommand calls, altough I don't know how the function will behave if it can't return for a long period of time; but probably it will work. Give it a try.

[rob-bateman]

basically you just need to understand that with any Maya plugin, you will always require additional mel scripts to handle the GUI. It's easiest if in the plugin you define some new mel commands that handles the alienbrain hookup. One way of finding out how the alienbrain plugin works is to look at the info in the plugin manager, then (if they've written the plugin properly) run

help someAlienBrainCommand;

in mel for any commands they have listed - this should give you some info as to the flags they are using (i've never used alienbrain, so this might not work if it's a fairly hacky plugin). I did write some stuff on modifying maya's file menu for cvs :

http://www.robthebloke.org/research/maya/version\_control.htm

I guess they might take a similar approach, though i'm not sure....

[jackyu000]

Hi Daniel :

MEL Script doesn't offer any command like "FileBrowser". There is only "FileBrowserDialog" I guess.
"FileBrowserDialog" simply open a stand-alone window and it will be closed immediately after job is done. What I want is to insert a fileBrower into my own UI and it will always be there. I think the guy from SecretLevel did good sample for me. But it takes some time to study. I will try it, thanks.

Hi Rob :

Yes, "alienbrain for maya" provide 20~30 MEL commands, include cehckin, checkout, getPropety... and a lot of document. Thanks for your advice, I will use Maya API to hookup with alienbrain.
There is one more question, the Java programer asked me if I can send a message after I excute alienbrain MEL command everytime so that Java can know what I do to alienbrain. The protocol is "http", what kind of C++ library shoudle I include?

[daniel-faust]

fileBrowserDialog ist the command. How a file browser browser is built is described in \scripts\other\fileBrowser.mel maybe you find something useful in that file.

I have something which is almost a file browser, it's implemented in html, javascript, php, runs in mayas webbrowser and interacts with maya through the mel:// protocol. And another filebrowser which only uses html and javascript, which is ok if you don't want to have a server running just to browse the filesystem.

It basically parses file://c... pages to collect information about files and directories and presents it in a custom html layout. I think this might be interesting for you, but remember that you can only perform mel calls and not create mel controls. You could create a Pane which contains a webBrowser control (if it exixts) and then other mel controls aside from it, to get a hybrid window. The treeviews in javascript exist, search the web. Another problem is that the html page cannot receive commands from maya other that what is passed in the URL.