Fusion360DevTools

A collection of utilities to assist in developing Fusion 360 Add-ins

Installation

Follow the installation instructions here for your particular OS version of Fusion 360

Usage

Everything lives in a Fusion360DevTools tab in the Design workspace, split into panels.

ATTRIBUTES

Attributes are invisible, so these make them visible while you are developing with them.

Command	What it does
Attributes - All	Lists every attribute in the active document
Attributes - Selected	Lists the attributes on the current selection
Attributes - Add	Adds an attribute by hand, for setting up a test case

DATA

Command	What it does
Data Info	Hub, project, folder, lineage and version URNs for the active document, plus the base64 forms and a Fusion Team link
Close All	Closes every open document without saving

INFO

Command	What it does
API Object Explorer	Walks the API object model for whatever you select, following properties as you click them
User Interface Explorer	The tree of workspace, tab, panel and control ids, which is how you find the id to attach your own command to
Appearance Explorer	Every appearance and material applied in the document, and lets you remove them
Command Stream	Streams the id and name of each command as it runs, and the current selection, so you can see what Fusion is actually calling

TEST

Command	What it does
Start Performance Capture	Starts a cProfile capture
Stop Performance Capture	Ends the capture and opens the results palette
Record Test / Run Test / Stop Recording	Records a command and its inputs, then replays it and compares the resulting geometry. Very experimental, so it is off by default — set ENABLE_RECORD_COMMANDS = True in config.py to show these

ADD-INS

Shortcuts to the Scripts and Add-Ins dialog, the App Store, and your local AddIns folder.

HELP

Links to the online API documentation, the offline CHM download, and the Fusion 360 GitHub samples.

Performance Capture

1. Start Performance Capture begins profiling. It confirms in the TEXT COMMANDS palette, since there is no dialog to show.
2. Use the commands you want to measure.
3. Stop Performance Capture snapshots the capture and opens the results palette.

The palette has four views over the same capture, all driven by the filters above them:

• Hot spots — the pstats table, sortable by any column, with a share bar on every row. Select a row to see what called it and what it called; those lists are clickable, so you can walk the call graph, and a breadcrumb trail tracks where you have been.
• Call tree — the call graph walked out into a tree, each branch's time scaled to the path it sits on. cProfile records a call graph rather than call stacks, so a function reached from several callers appears under each of them and branch times are an approximation; recursion stops at the repeated call.
• Modules — one row per file, expandable to the functions inside it.
• Compare — two captures side by side, to see whether a change actually helped.

Every function is tagged with the kind of code it is — your code, Fusion API, adsk wrappers, Python, imports, or Dev Tools itself. That is what the bar at the top breaks down, and what the Hide imports and Hide Python internals filters use to get the noise out of the way.

A capture can be saved as .prof (which snakeviz and tuna read), .csv or .json, or written to the TEXT COMMANDS palette as the classic pstats table. Open source on a selected function opens that line in VS Code or PyCharm. The palette follows Fusion's light or dark theme and has a toggle to override it.

Captures are kept for the session, so the Capture dropdown and the Compare view can reach back through the last several of them. They are not written to disk unless you export them.

Working on the palette itself

The palette is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript in commands/performance/resources/html, and the page can be opened outside Fusion: export a capture as .json, save it as static/fixture.json, serve that folder over http (python3 -m http.server) and open index.html. With no Fusion bridge present the page falls back to that fixture, so the styling can be worked on without restarting the add-in. fixture*.json is git ignored.

Note that a browser preview does not exercise the Fusion bridge. Inside a palette the adsk object is injected some time after the page loads, which is why performance.js waits for it before its first request.

Notes

Fusion now runs Python 3.14. Two things worth knowing if you are writing against these tools:

• Since Python 3.12, cProfile registers with sys.monitoring instead of sys.setprofile. Only one profiler can be active per interpreter, and the slot is not released by garbage collection, so commands/performance/profile_utils.py reclaims an abandoned one rather than leaving profiling broken for the rest of the session.
• The API's generated type annotations now read adsk.fusion.Foo rather than adsk::fusion::Foo. objectType and classType() still use the :: form.

License

Samples are licensed under the terms of the MIT License. Please see the LICENSE file for full details.

Written by

Written by Patrick Rainsberry

See more useful Fusion 360 Utilities