With the upcoming revision of Nova Studio 2010 (6.0.0.26) and in order to illustrate the Custom Action developing template, I decided to develop a new feature to extend Nova Studio 2010 actions in the Actions Builder tool.
I called it Change State (Excel). Sometimes in your Nova Scene, you need to change on the fly some of Nova entities' properties. This new Custom Action will allow that kind of modification on simple type properties such as float, int and string as a example. So from a simple Excel file, you will have just to define the entity guid ("Id" column) or entity name ("Name" column) to be modified and all needed properties names in other columns as shown below:
Some important rules to well understand:
- Jet oledb provider 4.0 must be installed on your computer (the custom action will check that),
- The custom action will work only on the first Worksheet of the Excel workbook,
- It will work on all Nova Entities (objects, cameras, lights, Scene, Domains, ...),
- The First line always contains the column name,
- if "Id" is provided, "Name" is not taken into account,
- if "Name" is provided (and "Id" not provided) all entities with the same name are taken into account,
- A column without any value is not taken into account,
- You can put the property name you want since the process is dynamic,
- Only simple value types are taken into account (Except RGBAColor type as shown before on Ambiant Color as an example).
Here is a small screenshot of this new feature:
The checkbox "File is side by side to scene in running mode" means that while executing the custom action, the file path will be calculated according to the Nova Scene path and not the original path. In design mode, the checkbox is not taken into account and only the previous complete path is used.
This new custom action will not be included in 6.0.0.26 version install, but in a next post, I will explain you how to install it.
Stay tuned!