Does ScriptJob know WHICH attribute changed?

[taytay]

I need a particular procedure to detect when some particular Maya objects are moved, rotated, etc, so I bind them to a scriptJob as follows:
scriptJob -attributeChange Sphere1.m "DoStuff("Sphere1")"

Which calls a procedure every time this sphere moves, and furthermore tells the procedure which object it is that did the moving. That's the key. The procedure has to know what object it is that did the changing.
Now here's the tricky part: If I rename Sphere1, the scriptJob will continue to fire, which is good, but it will continue to call the DoStuff method with the parameter "Sphere1." So I thought, "that's cool - I'll just detect when Sphere1 changes its name," which I can do by having scriptJob detect the NameChanged event. Well that's no good since I don't know how to find out WHICH object it is that had its name changed.

So basically my question is this: Can scriptJob -attributeChanged tell me which object or attribute did the changing? If not, I have the same question scriptJob -NameChanged. How do I know the source of the event?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

• Taylor

[macaronikazoo]

mmm, i've had similar problems with scriptjob. i had a case where i attached it to attribChange, but the problem i found with that, was that when i scrubbed through the timeilne, that counted as an attribute change if the attrib was animated. Very annoying.

but yeah, i think you're stuffed. unless you plugged the object into another hidden node (say you created a time node for example) and then checked that node for the names of connected to that object.

oh, just though of another one, u could always check the undo queue, and parse that for an object name to find out which object was renamed... its a bit of a hack, but if you get desperate.

[taytay]

Thanks for your help.
Ooo - cool. I like the undo idea! I know it's hack, but I didn't realize I could get that much info from the queue. Do I have that access from MEL, or is it time to code the API? I tried to do some undo manipulation with the API a while back, and from what I remember, it seemed a bit opaque. I kinda like plugging the object into another node, but then I would have an awful lot of hidden nodes to manage. Not a bad suggestion though.

Many thanks,

Taylor

[campbell]

similar prob w expressions - i wish you could query their default object names (at least their cnxns update dynamically to name changes, but for cases where you need the name outside of a cnxn).

if when the attrib changes you can be sure the user will (or you want to force them to) have the object whose attribute your monitoring selected, then you can query cuurrent selectn on the attribChange to retrieve the name.

alternatively, you could write an expressn that monitors your attribute. you'll need to write out to a dummy attribute to pull evaluatn most likely (search archive for more info if you need it).

[tbriggs]

I would make a node with attributes that correspond to the ones you want to test. Then I would connect the attributes from the objects that are actually doing the changing. You could have base position and then new position attributes and test if they are different via expression. This has the added virtue of forcing all the input nodes to update before the expression evaluates as they are all in the dependency stream.

[macaronikazoo]

i believe you can query resonably detailed information using mel, but I've never done it myself, so don't quote me there...

--just had a look at the docs, and undoInfo -q -undoName will give you the name of the previous command executed... kinda cool.

and as for plugging objects into another node, you wouldn't have to have one node object, you could just create one hidden node, and plug all objects into custom attributes created on the node. that way you'll find it easier to get around naming clashes, which you'd probably run into if you had a node/object.

cheers.

[joojaa]

gwaak... someoene with extra valid plugin ids could acualy compile a node to run certain mel on marked dirty... its super simple and works fine...

[taytay]

SWEET - the undoInfo works like a champ, telling me exactly what command was executed, including the parameters, so I can parse that to discover what was renamed to what, and thus keep track of it. Brilliant. Many thanks my friend!