Shelves

Here we’ll walk through how shelves are constructed via json. If you would like to see how these align to you’re plugins then please check out Plugin Creation

The shelve are built using a json file with the extension “.layout” just like our menus. The json file is to design the layout of each shelf, what tools are displayed their icons and if a shelf button contains a popup menu.

Just with the menus once you create a .layout file and you’ve defined a layout then in your zoo_package.json file append the below environment variable under the environment section.

},
"ZOO_SHELF_LAYOUTS": ["tools/layouts/mytools_shelf_layout.layout"]
}

Simple Example of a layout file:

{
  "sortOrder": -1,
  "shelves": [
    {
      "name": "ZooToolsPro",
      "children": [
        {
          "id": "zoo.shelf.dev",
          "displayLabel": false,
          "icon": "devMenu_shlf",
          "children": [
            {
              "type": "toolset",
              "id": "zooIcons"
            }
            ]
        }
    }]
}

Example using a popup Menu.

{
"id": "zoo.maya.connect.selection.localsrt",
"type": "command",
"displayLabel": false,
"icon": "",
"variants": [
    {
        "name": "Connect_srt",
        "label": "Connect SRT",
        "icon": "",
        "arguments": {
            "translate": true,
            "rotate": true,
            "scale": true
        }
    }
    ]
}

Description of each key

Key	Type	Description
id	str	the command or definition id specfied on the class
type	str	The Type of tool, either command or tooldefinition
displayLabel	str	The Ui label for the action
icon	str	The icon in the zootools library to use ie. “arrow”
variants	list	A list of dicts in the same form as above
arguments	dict	extra arguments to pass to the tooldefinition or command