PluginGroup

[_RuedigerSchmidt180569_]

Hi I'm proting some of my plugins vom MacOS X to Windows.
Now I have a big problem with code witch makes use of the PluginGroup Suite
After the folowing code.
sAIArt->NewArt( kPluginArt, kPlaceInsideOnTop, parentArt, &pluginArt );
sAIPluginGroup-> UseAIPluginGroup( pluginArt, g->handleToMyPlugin );

no matter witch API function I'm calling I end up directly in the Illustrator. This means I'm steping through the code with the debugger Step over the to lines above next time I step over an API function it leaves the debugger and jumps to Illustrator without executing any code
after the API Call (jumps from within the API function to Ilustrator and doesn't return to the debugger)

all code works if I create a kGroupArt instead of a kPluginArt or if
I use SetPluginArtPluginGroup instead of UseAIPluginGroup (but this causes problems when the file is saved and reopend)
Any ideas what is wrong?

[A. Patterson]

> no matter witch API function I'm calling I end up directly in the
> Illustrator. This means I'm steping through the code with the debugger
> Step over the to lines above next time I step over an API function it
> leaves the debugger and jumps to Illustrator without executing any
> code after the API Call (jumps from within the API function to
> Ilustrator and doesn't return to the debugger)

Well, whenever that happens it means something so bad has gone wrong that Illustrator has given up on your code and returned. I inherited a code base that had this happen quite often years ago but it's much less common in my stuff now. A big part of that is constant vigilance on the return values, and ASSERT()s on the states of various things.

If it's constantly dying on a particular call, the it's usually because something you're feeding that call is just plain wrong. E.g. if you didn't initialize the handle you were expecting to get filled with a new art handle in that NewArt() call and NewArt() failed for some reason, you'd end up passing a handle with a bogus value. That might very well cause the behaviour you're seeing. I'm not saying that's what your problem is, but that's kind of thing that causes the API to barf sometimes.

At any rate, we use a few PluginGroups in our MAPublisher product and I just checked our code -- that's pretty much exactly what we do so I don't know why it would complain. I'd stick in a whole whack load of test code and query very carefully all the variables you use there to verify they're okay (maybe the custom art registration failed for some reason?) If any of THOSE fail unexpectedly, that should give you a pretty strong indication of where the problem lies.

Hope that helps, but let me know if you can't get it working and uncover anything else.

[_RuedigerSchmidt180569_]

Thank's very much for the answer
It's relay nice that I got an answer I will check my code
again more carefully (I did already but I know sometimes even the obvious is overlooked). It will take a while (1 week) as I have to work on other thinks to