[Bf-committers] Display external data inside Blender

[Jeroen Bakker]

Hi All,

I am integrating an external tool (blender-aid) to the blender UI. I 
came across some implementation issues for this that I want to discuss. 
I think this is the area of matt_e.

What do I need?
 * A way to display external data within blenderUI and without 
rebuilding blender
 * the external data is retrieved from a service calls and be available 
someway with RNA. The external data is refreshed by a long timer (±15 
minutes).

see http://www.pasteall.org/pic/310

What have I done?
 * blender aid supports services what can be called from a python within 
blender.
 * I have created an operator to be added in the info-space. I know that 
operators are not used for this.

see http://www.pasteall.org/9413/python

Problems I came across: (cannot call them problems as blender is 
designed this way)
 * the operator is created once. or when f8 is pressed (reload scripts) 
Only during the operator I'm able to update the value. afterwards the 
value is read-only (by design). updates once every 15 minutes or so in 
not possible at the moment.
 
One work around is to update the internal structure to store the 
received value in blenders data-model. but doing this I should rebuild 
blender.

Another one is to implement the elapse timer inside the info_space draw 
function. This is also bad design.

I think it is useful to support external data outside the blenders data 
model or have a place available to do the job. What do you think of it?


Greetings