Cool - thanks for taking interest in CREOSON!
CREOSON can be simply configured and up and running by running the CreosonSetup.exe. This starts the CREOSON service that will connect to Creo and listen for HTTP requests that can come in from any language using JSON transactions for command/response structures. It is independent of any language/environment you want to use to write your automations with.
Node.js is just one (1) option for working with the CREOSON service. (Node.js is specific to JavaScript). Node.js, VB, Python, etc. are all options for working with CREOSON because CREOSON is just a http interface that passes JSON transactions back and forth to perform operations in Creo. CREOPYSON as an option if you prefer Python - and has a pre-build set of interfaces similar to what you are looking for and has been very well received due to its simplicity.
We have not (yet) put together a formal Node.js library - but you could copy the code that is in our playground.html and run it from Node.js pretty easily. And we have a few other ideas on how to make CREOSON even more approachable for quick things (more on that in a couple of months most likely).
A quick way to play around and do your own thing would be to just copy/paste the playground.html in the CREOSON/web directory and use that code as a reference to build other functions and workflows. If you keep your new file in your CREOSON/web folder you can simply load it in your web browser and make calls to CREOSON from that. I recommend a good HTML editor for this (Sublime is a good choice - and it is also FREE).
Note: CREOSON has a built in HTTP server - so you would be accessing your copied page from http://localhost:9056/<yourNewFile>.html after CREOSON is up and running.
The Playground has a few examples in code that you can see by just simply "Viewing Source" for the HTML document and scrolling down to where the code is (e.g. "<!--CREOSON DEMO CODE-->" script block). It should be pretty obvious - but does require some external libraries to make it work for HTML interfaces (see the script references at the top of the HTML source) since it is a web page. Much of that code updates the HTML interface to inform the user of changes and status... so the actual code would be less than in that playground.html file. It should be failure obvious on how it works... each function is basically a structure that is commonly used ... then you just sequence them together (in our example) for the workflow you want.
You should be able to copy/paste some of the functions in that page to make new ones pretty quickly - e.g. creoOpenModel could be copied to a new function for exporting DXFs, or running a mapkey to export a STL, and then you just have to fill in the proper request object properties.
Note: mapkeys are a bit special... you have to put a delay after you run them to ensure they can complete before your next steps in your code. (e.g. setTimeout... - in javascript) this allows the mapkey to complete before running the next step in your code.
We may develop a special library for Node.js like CREOPYSON did for Python. (that was a great idea by the guy that built that).
After you get things working in HTML (again just playing around and testing) - moving the code to Node.js is pretty easy... but the intent there would be to setup a more production process for doing things (e.g. scheduled task or a service interface that could be tied into other business systems, or a stand alone application that could be distributed and shared - all things which go beyond this response).
Let me know if any of this did not make sense. And thanks for your interest in CREOSON!
Dave
