How to add hovering description (tooltip) on ACT created objects in Mechanical toolbar?

Rohith Patchigolla

How to add hovering description (tooltip) on ACT created objects in Mechanical toolbar as shown below.

Rohith Patchigolla

We first need to add "gettooltips" callback under Interface in the xml file.

  <interface context="Mechanical">
    <callbacks>
      <oninit>init</oninit>
     <gettooltips>getToolTips</gettooltips>
    </callbacks>
    <toolbar name="Extensions" caption="Extensions">
      <entry name="tbexample" icon="icon">
    <callbacks>
      <!-- This Python function is called when clicked -->
      <onclick>tbexampleclicked</onclick>
    </callbacks>
      </entry>
      <entry name="tbexample2" icon="icon">
    <callbacks>
      <!-- This Python function is called when clicked -->
      <onclick>tbexampleclicked</onclick>
    </callbacks>
      </entry>
      <separator></separator> 
      <entry name="tbexample3" icon="icon">
    <callbacks>
      <!-- This Python function is called when clicked -->
      <onclick>tbexampleclicked</onclick>
    </callbacks>
      </entry>
      <entry name="tbexample4" icon="icon">
    <callbacks>
      <!-- This Python function is called when clicked -->
      <onclick>tbexampleclicked</onclick>
    </callbacks>
      </entry>
    </toolbar>
  </interface>

Then we need to create a dictionary of act entry name vs description as shown below in the python file.

toolTips = {
"tbexample":"This is a tooltip for first button.", "tbexample2":"Tooltip for second button.",
"tbexample3":"Tooltip for third button."
}

Then we need to create the function "getToolTips" defined in the xml under the defined callback, in the python file.

def getToolTips(name):
    if name in toolTips.keys(): return toolTips[name]
    return name

Full text of .py file, to reconstruct this example.

clr.AddReference("Ans.UI.Toolkit.Base")
clr.AddReference("Ans.UI.Toolkit")
from Ansys.UI.Toolkit import *
 
def init(context):
    ExtAPI.Log.WriteMessage("Init ACT example...")
 
def tbexampleclicked(analysis):
    MessageBox.Show("ACT example is a success!")
 
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------
#       Create Tooltips Dictionary
#-----------------------------------------------------------------------
toolTips = {
"tbexample":"This is a tooltip for first button.", "tbexample2":"Tooltip for second button.",
"tbexample3":"Tooltip for third button."
}
 
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#       Tooltips
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
def getToolTips(name):
    if name in toolTips.keys(): return toolTips[name]
    return name