Inventor Command!

A command launcher for Autodesk Inventor. Similar to Quicksilver, Launchy, Spotlight, Alfred, etc.

Description

Original idea is that this would be an add-in that will allow inventor users to quickly run ilogic rules from a launcher interface. The user would hit a hotkey (perhaps !) to invoke the launcher, presenting the user with a single text box. As the user starts typing, a filtered list of ilogic rules is displayed below the text box. The user may select an item from this list to activate it. See this image for reference.

Planned Features

After some discussion on discord, several other uses were proposed. A running list is presented below:

• Allow the activation of:

  • in-memory ilogic rules
  • current file ilogic rules?
  • vba macros (public subs w/out parameters)
  • inventor commands (ControlDefinitions)

• Possible manipulation/opening/right-click-menu of

  • Currently open documents
  • In-memory documents
  • referenced documents?
  • ability to restrict filtering by:
  • documents immediately referenced by currently open document
  • all documents referenced by currently open document
  • all currently referenced documents (application-wide)
  • all open documents

• Other thoughts

  • Include fuzzy search? (research options on this)
  • quicksilver has the concept of different "actions" that you can perform on a selection. These actions may differ based on the selection (e.g. a file [open, show, copy, edit permissions, pipe, etc] will present different actions than an application [run, show, uninstall, etc]).

Architecture thoughts

• Write in C# as an inventor add-in

• Develop an object for each type of launchable thing.

• Class: Launchable

  • Method: Activate
  • Property: Description
  • Property: others as needed
  • Property: Type
  • examples: LaunchableRule, LaunchableCommand, LaunchableDocument, LaunchableMacro

• Interface: Ilaunchable

  • Activate
  • Description
  • Type
  • ???

• Create indexers that knows how to build a list of each launchable type

  • Method: BuildLaunchabeIndex -> returns list of Ilaunchable, or ?

• Build a master searchable index (list of Ilaunchable) that we can filter.

  • When the master index is built, you can filter by Ilaunchable Types to include/remove various launchable types from the list when presenting to the user. Use linq?
  • Set these by was of a configuration screen, or have another quicker way to access this?

Todo:

Look at how some of the other application launchers are structured for research.