custom text completion/description and tags for custom external
Hi,
With built-in objects, when you begin writing a message near that object, autocompletion will prompt you with relevant messages. I would like to have the same behaviour with a custom external. It would be very handy for an external to which you can send a lot of different messages. Is it possible ? if so, how ?
soooo… is my question not clear, or really noone has an answer ? :/
You need to write reference files. There’s not a lot of information about that at this point but if you look at the tap.tools for instance this should give you some hints.
Ok, thanks a lot for the link
(…buuut, tap tools, weren’t they priced software ? or did that change ?)
(nevermind the question between parenthesis, i found the answer there : the story of tap tools. Out of topic, but currently i’m sad because i can’t install latest tap tools nor jamoma on osx 10.6.8. And as they distribute only automatic installers for older versions, it’s a pain getting it to work on max 6.1.3 which is still separated from 6.0.8 on my machine. Life is hard sometimes. )
(i could install the things by renaming max folders. Now need to go through those tap tools 4 sources without beeing able to use them. I have hope though )
So, writing "standard" reference files should be enough to ensure that magical autocompletion will appear ?
yes
I found this not to be the case for writing a Max 6 package (max 6.1.6). I have reference files that work beautifully, but do not work with text autocompletion. The solution I found was placing the .maxpat files into the mypackage > patchers directory. You cannot place them in a subdirectory (e.g. mypackage > patchers > subdir will not work). No reference file needed.
I found that Jamoma uses its init file for adding clippings, which are buried in subdirectories. I don’t have any way to know that this adds any autocompletion, however.
max db.addmetadata jmod.clip.10harmonics~ clipping tag Jamoma;
max db.addmetadata jmod.clip.10harmonics~ clipping tag "audio module";
Figured it out with myinit.txt file, placed inside mypackage > init directory.
example line:
max db.addvirtual alias jit.pass jit.op;
where jit.pass is the alias that you type in and jit.op is the object that will appear.
The "db.addvirtual" message to Max is obsolete and will be going away in future versions of Max. It also slows the launch of Max down on every launch of the application. I highly advise making ref pages as suggested above.
Cheers
Thanks Timothy. I’ve since deleted all lines of ‘db.addvirtual’, restarted Max (running 6.1.7), and all is fine. I do have docs > refpages and help files inside my package.
I have attached my Max package as reference for anyone following this thread who is into writing refpages, since this process took me some time to finger out, and documentation was scattered.
Thanks. I have learned a lot more problems joining the forums.
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