UI.menu(): non persistent menu object (Windows only)

[Fredosixx]

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By chance, I notice a strange behavior with menus on Windows (all SU versions).

In short Sketchup::Menu objects returned by UI.menu() or by creating a submenu via add_submenu have a limited scope and cannot be reused later on.

Consider the following code

module TestMenu
  @menu = UI.menu("Plugins").add_submenu('My Submenu')
  @menu.add_menu('Menu item at load') {}
	
  def self.create_menu
    @menu.add_item("MyMenu 2") {}
  end	
end

When loaded, the menu entry Menu item at load will be created. HOWEVER, calling TestMenu.create_menu will not create a menu entry.

You can also test this issue in the Ruby Console, even with the main menu.

1. UI.menu("Plugins").add_item('menu 1') {} will create a menu item
2. m = UI.menu("Plugins") ; m.add_item('menu 1') {} will create a menu item
3. m = UI.menu("Plugins"), and then m.add_item('menu 1') {} will NOT create a menu item

Note that this works fine on Mac.

[DanRathbun]

By chance, I notice a strange behavior with menus on Windows (all SU versions).

In short Sketchup::Menu objects returned by UI.menu() or by creating a submenu via add_submenu have a limited scope and cannot be reused later on.

We (MS Windows coders) have always known about this, ... and have often complained about it.

You can later on call UI::menu and receive a new reference to a "top level" menu.

But calling Menu#add_submenu with an existing submenu name just creates another same-named submenu instead of returning the a reference to the existing submenu.

This has been a great frustration over the years !

@thomthom, has this already been logged as a FR and how long ago ?

Note that this works fine on Mac.

This I did not know ! This fact would make this a platform parity issue.

[thomthom]

In short Sketchup::Menu objects returned by UI.menu() or by creating a submenu via add_submenu have a limited scope and cannot be reused later on.

Yes. It's bug in the SketchUp menu handling code on Windows. We were looking into this last week.

[sketchupbot]

Logged as: SKEXT-3109

[Ben-Garcia-DB-Solutions]

Has a workaround for this ever been created?

The examples tutorials mention putting all the functions into 1 submenu, but doesn't actually explain how to do so!

Best method I found was to create a $submenu global variable submenu in load_tutorials.rb, then replace the menu.add_item with submenu.add_item in every example file.