Calling an Automation plug-in from a Filter plug-in

[exhaze]

Is there any way to do this? Viveza seems to be able to do it in their plug-in, however, I haven't found anything in the documentation or examples detailing how to pass data from a filter plug-in to an automation plug-in. I know it's possible to use an automation plug-in to invoke a filter plug-in, but how do you go the other way around?

Thanks in advance.

[Chris Cox]

You don't go the other way around.

[exhaze]

OK, thanks for that bit, Chris. Let me describe the situation in more detail what I'm trying to achieve:

I want to call a plug-in that is called from the Filters menu, which then somehow (this is the step I'm trying to figure out) passes its result to a plug-in that is in the Automation menu, which uses the result it got to create a new layer with the result.

This *IS* possible, because this is exactly what the well-known Viveza plug-in does. Is there any way to do this by means of having the automation plug-in react to some event that is triggered by the filter plug-in?

[Tom Ruark · Accepted solution]

What you do is set up an automation plug-in that "listens" for the filter plug-in. The filter plug-in as a unique id that the automation plug-in can "hear". You pass back and forth information via the scripting calling and return parameters. You have to piece together different parts of different plug-ins in the SDK to get this to work.

Pair #1:

Look at the textauto (automation) and textformat (format) example pair. The file format (textformat) is picked which just makes an empty document for a text (txt) file. The automation plug-in (textauto) hears this and then goes and gets the text out of the document and creates a text layer.

Pair #2:

Look at automationfilter (automation) and hidden (filter) example pair. The automation plug-in starts it and uses the hidden filter to actually change the pixels. This is a better example of sending commands and results back and forth from two different types of plug-ins.

[Terence_Tay1]

If all you're doing is adding a new layer, also consider doing it using Javascript scripting, which is easier than writing an automation plugin.

[Noel Carboni]

Sure would be nice if the plug-in interface were to be expanded so that a Filter plugin could create a new layer, though, so we didn't have to go through such rigamarole.  I have wanted to add a [ ] Result In New Layer option for a long time... 

Seriously; nowaday's virtually everything's about being "non-destructive".  How about at least providing a complete example in the SDK that accomplishes the filter/automation listening and coordination mentioned above?

-Noel

[exhaze]

Noel, I've been able to achieve the wanted result, although it took a lot of piecing of different information together to achieve. Perhaps when I have more time, I'll post a detailed explanation of how to do it