[Bf-funboard] Associating 3D models with Blender

[Campbell Barton]

Since blender can load a fair few model formats.
it would be nice to be able to associate blender with these files in the 
operating system.

so you could for instance associate blender with PLY, 3DS, OBJ... etc.

This basically means making
    blender.exe c:\home\me\mymodel.obj
...call the correct python script rather then saying the file isnt knowm.


There are 2 ways this could be done,
1) have a script that runs when the filetype is not known, this script 
would check which importer to use deal with calling the right script 
with the filename arg.

This would be easy to implement, just call an external script's function 
with the file as an argument, the rest is done in python.


2) have 2 functions in each importer...
* file_is_compat(path) - returns true if the importer can load this file.
* file_load(path) - loads the file into blender. it may work differently 
then running the script from the menu (no popup UI for instance).

This way is better because if you write your own importer or download 
one thats not included in blender, as long as it has those 2 functions 
will insure that file association works the same as other formats.

- This would run whenever the file format wasn't known by 
blender.looking through all the scripts in the import menu and running 
the ones that have the file_is_compat(path) and file_load(path) 
functions defined.


This might allow blenders File->Open to open 3ds, obj etc (a design 
decision, maybe we dont want this)

and is a step towards having drag and drop into the 3d view.


-- 
Campbell J Barton (ideasman42)