Creating a new extension

In this section, you'll learn how to create a simple Hello World style extension.

It will be on the form a dialog that will be shown when the user clicks a menu item with the DCC.

Prerequisites

• Install Connect v24+
• Download and install the Maya framework base integration.
• Create a new folder for your extension. This folder will contain all the files for your extension:

  cd ~/Documents/ftrack
  mkdir -p extensions/hello-world

Developing

1. Create a dialogs folder inside the extension folder:

  cd ~/Documents/ftrack/extensions/hello-world
  mkdir dialogs
  mkdir plugins
  mkdir tool-configs
  mkdir widgets

2. In you operating system, set the environment variable FTRACK_USER_EXTENSIONS_PATH to the folder where you created the extension:

  export FTRACK_USER_EXTENSIONS_PATH=~/Documents/ftrack/extensions

3. Start Connect and launch a framework integration, your extension should now be visible under the ftrack menu.

Overview

📄️ Dialog

Create a helloworlddialog.py file inside your user extensions folder with the following content:

📄️ Plugin

Here we will add a validator plugin, to Maya scene publisher, that validates the node graph.

📄️ Widget

Here we will add a widget to the previous validator plugin, that fetches and displays the root nodes of the node graph.

📄️ Tool config

Here we modify the Maya scene publisher tool-config to use the new mayascenevalidator plugin and it's UI - the widget.