Varaible contents and flags

[francesco-coan]

Hi you all MEL masters, I owuld have a question for you.
I am making a procedure to create extra ortographic cam and I would like to know if I can call a flag of a command with a variable:

global proc createOrtographicCam (string $camName)
{   
    string $newCam[] = camera -n $camName;
    viewSet -camName $newCam[0];
 }

proc createOrtographicCam bottom

proc createOrtographicCam right

proc createOrtographicCam back

...and so on

In this way I would be able to can call the procedure passing the argument BOTTOM or LEFT or BACK ecc and make this argument combine with the view set command generating the proper flag.

The core of the problem is basically use the content of a variable to creat a flag for a command. Is that doable and if yes, how?

Thanks for your kind answers.

Cheers
Francesco

[joojaa]

global proc createOrtographicCam (string $camName)
{   
    string $newCam[] = `camera -n $camName`;
    viewSet ("-"+$camName) $newCam[0];
}

They are just strings you know. You just dont have to quote them because Maya presumes certain things to be strings even without quotes see:

viewSet -top someCam;

ise equal to writing:

viewSet("-top","someCam");

ergo all the same rules for string manipulation qualifies. But since nothing containing code can qualify as a string you must solve it first hence the () and now you must declare making strings yourself because they are nolonger implied srings for the parser.

PS: you can even use empty flags but you need a correct number of slots declared. So if you dont know if you need a flag or not you CAN do it without eval too.

[francesco-coan]

Thanks a lot... I'll try it straigh away

Cheers
Francesco

[francesco-coan]

Great...it works perfectly. Thanks more over for the enlighted tip about the concatenation of strings and variable to create a flag.
It make ecerything more flexible and scalable.

Cheers
F