Dear All,
I've been reading the replies here for a while but this is my first post. So thanks for previous advice and I hope you can help me out now.
I'm writing a version control system between Maya and Visual Source Safe. It's designed to be transparent so that it automatically gets and checkins documents when they're opened and saved. As such, I am altering some of the code in the pv_performAction and SaveScene mel files.
First off, I would like some suggestions on source control (I don't like messing with mel interface files). I would do the operations via MSceneMessages but for two reasons:
1) I need to know the paths of the file being saved AND the file being opened. e.g. avoid checkout after unneccessary checkin.
2) I may need to halt opening a file if the saved file can't be properly checked in.
My strategy was to access the source control through a plugin and write the interface in MEL. The problem here is not being able to return status codes (other than success/fail) from the plugin back to MEL. The alternative was writing all the code in C (no returning of values), but then what about the dialog boxes?
A) Can you easily return data from a plugin to a MEL command? E.g the plugin setting a node attribute which MEL can read.
Can you access dialog boxes from a plugin? E.g if you use MGlobal::ExecuteCommand(confirmDialog(..)), you can't pass back the Yes, No or Cancel result.
I can see how to do these things, I just want to do them in the best way. Source control is delicate enough already, I don't want any more complexity