Selecting And Parenting (Project #1)

The Big Picture:
I was tasked with writing a script in Python for our Softimage pipeline that allows users to inject a model from one scene into another.

The Problem:
If a user doesn't have anything selected specifically, I need to select just the objects in the scene root but not all their children.


The Solution:
After much searching and trial and error, I finally found this bit of code did the trick:

xsi = Application
log = Application.LogMessage
sel = win32com.client.Dispatch( "XSI.Collection" )
if xsi.Selection.Count:
 if xsi.Selection[0].FullName == "Scene_Root":
  list = xsi.ActiveSceneRoot.Children
  for child in list:
   sel.Add( child )
 else:
  for x in xsi.Selection:
   sel.Add(x)
else:
 log( "Nothing was selected. Using the entire scene!" )
 
 list = xsi.ActiveSceneRoot.Children
 for child in list:
  sel.Add( child )

For the purposes of this simple script, this was exactly what I needed.

What I Discovered:
Trying to select everything simply using

Application.SelectAll()

will grab everything in the scene except the "Scene Root" but that also means it's grabbing the children nodes and their children, etc. I was having to export a model to be imported into a scene later in the process -- so parenting all the selected objects under a newly created "Model" node was a problem using this method. What would happen is a flat list of objects being placed under the new node, rather than keeping any hierarchy in place.