SPSuitesSuite and SPPluginsSuite

[Wayne_Constable-AEjbzi]

Hi gurus,

Has anyone had any experience with using the above mentioned Suites? I don't want to go into too much detail about what I'm trying to achieve as I don't have enough room in this little box.

Basically I want to modularize my plugin's functionality so I'm aiming to develop multiple plugin's that export their own suites. That on it's own is not a problem, however I'd like the ability to specifiy which version of my suite (there will be multiple) will be loaded. This brought me to the SPSuitesSuite - which in turn got me looking into additional suite lists, which also took me to additional plugin lists, hence the SPPluginsSuite.

I have some specific questions, but I don't want to ask them just yet.

Any takers?

--W

[A. Patterson]

I've got some experience with those suites, but it's been a bit. I've exported functionality via suites published by a plug-in, at any rate.

[Wayne_Constable-AEjbzi]

Well, as usual with these kind of things, I managed to export a suite from one plugin and dynamically load it with another, specifiying the suite version and internal version using SPSuitesSuite after I posted that message.

However I'm going to end up with a number of plugins that each export a number of suites and have multiple versions of those suites. So I was trying to understand how additional suite and plugin lists work but ended up with a list of questions:

* After creating an additional suite list, how would another plugin get access to that list?
* How would you do the same as above but with an additional plugin list?
* How does the PIPropertyList structure work? I've read, re-read and read again, but I still don't understand it!
* Should I simply ignore the above and go with Illustrator's global lists for my needs?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, but this has been doing my head in for the past couple of weeks now.

Thanks!

--W

[A. Patterson]

I'm afraid I've never worked with the suite lists stuff. Just exported my suite and that's that. I'm not quite sure why you'd need all that junk though -- after all, nothing stops you from requesting different versions of the same suite, I do that with Illustrator in our core product.

Unless you're looking to enumerate the available suites, in which case I'm not going to be much help :P

As for PIPropertyList, are you talking about the stuff in SPProps.h? Because there's almost nothing in the SuitePea headers having to do with the PIPL that actually works in Illustrator. I've messed around with a bunch of the callers & selectors that are *supposed* to come in, and they don't. I talked to a couple of the AI developers a couple of years ago and they told me the AI PIPL stuff is basically a greatly stripped down version of the stuff found in Photoshop's SDK. -- basically, there are a lot of functions that do nothing.

From looking at AI's shipped-with plugins, you can see that there are a few PIPL options that seem to be present -- most notable the EXPT directive that *seems* to publish something indicating what suites are available. I say 'seems' because I've never had much luck making a PIPL that actually worked with that directive -- and it doesn't help that the only tools for working with a PIPL in plain text ship with Photoshop, not AI. It's probably telling that the developers told me that a number of their shipped-with plugins just use the PIPL that comes with the SDK!

[Wayne_Constable-AEjbzi]

Thanks for your response. I think when I saw that you could create your own suite lists, I immediately thought the logical thing to do would be to create my own list to keep them separate from the global list. But after seeing your response and doing a bit of experimentation, I agree that it's unneccessary.

Only reason I ask about the PIPropertyList stuff in SPProps.h (and SPPiPL.h) was because I saw it referenced in SPPPlugs.h by the SPPluginSuite. The fact that SPPlugs.h does not appear in the suite index of the documentation should've been a clue that it wasn't going to be useful.

Thanks for the advice though. It's good to hear from someone else who's had experience with this stuff as google was giving me nothing. You've probably saved me a lot of time from going down a dead-end road!