Dock Outliner 1.1.0 for Maya (maya script)

After such a long time…

I was always asking myself why Outliner is not dock-able like “Attribute Editor” for instance. And this question led me to this recent little MEL I wrote that changes the Outliner’s behavior and gives you more room to manage your layouts.

In the beginning I faced a couple of problems, and here are the solutions I found:

• Maya crashing when you try to open Outliner from Window menu. Which I ended up changing the Outliner menu item’s underlying command.
• Outliner disappear after opening a Maya Scene or a New Scene. Which I fixed by running two scriptJobs that re-parent the outlinerPanel to the control in any of those two situations.
• Filter text box not working after moving the OutlinerWindow content under the dockedControl. The Trick that I used for this was to move outlinerPanel‘s content to the OutlinerWindow that I created after docking the window itself and that’s because of the internal disconnection between the Filter text box command and the Outliner contents path simply because when the outlinerPanel is being created the connection is also being made, so if you change the path afterwards they don’t see each other anymore.

After extracting the contents of the dev_dockOutliner.zip file, put the .mel file into Maya’s scripts folder. you also have to add the two following lines to userSetup.mel file.

evalDeferred -low "dev_dockOutliner";
evalDeferred -lp "dev_outlinerMenuItem";

I also have to mention that if you have BonusTools installed you first need to make sure you have the following line in the userSetup.mel file and of-course this goes with any other Maya Plug-in that tries to run in startup with the help of userSetup.mel.

bonusToolsMenu;