OpenGL, fetching the names of all uniform blocks in your program

Question

I want to auto-bind uniform blocks with certain named values to certain binding points when I compile a shader. For example, I have some basic, default fixed binding points that are always used for certain things like:

0 Camera
1 Model
2 Material
3 Lights

At the moment I'm binding manually by finding the index of a named block with glGetUniformBlockIndex, and then binding it with glUniformBlockBinding. What I'd like to do is fetch the set of all block names in my shader program. When I iterate with glGetActiveUniformsiv, I get a list of all uniforms, which excludes block names.

Is there any way to do this without testing and failing each of my above names to see if it's an active block with glGetUniformBlockIndex? There's no glGetActiveUniformBlocksiv, is there...

Answer 1

This is pretty easy; just the program introspection API to fetch the indices. First, ask how many uniform blocks there are:

GLint numBlocks;
glGetProgramiv(prog, GL_ACTIVE_UNIFORM_BLOCKS, &numBlocks);​

All of your uniform block indices are on the half-open range [0, numBlocks). So iterate through them and get their names.

std::vector<std::string> nameList;
nameList.reserve(numBlocks);
for(int blockIx = 0; blockIx < numBlocks; ++blockIx)
{
    GLint nameLen;
    glGetActiveUniformBlockiv​(prog, blockIx, GL_UNIFORM_BLOCK_NAME_LENGTH, &nameLen);

    std::vector<GLchar> name; //Yes, not std::string. There's a reason for that.
    name.resize(nameLen);
    glGetActiveUniformBlockName​(prog, blockIx, nameLen, NULL, &name[0]);

    nameList.push_back(std::string());
    nameList.back().assign(name.begin(), name.end() - 1); //Remove the null terminator.
}

BTW, if you're doing this because you think it's faster, stop. First, performance is irrelevant since this is one-time setup code. Second, you're doing this for maybe 4-8 blocks at most. It's not going to affect actual performance in any way. So really, there's no reason to not just get the indices by name if that's what you're ultimately doing. The introspection API is for when you don't know what is there.