I'm busy working on a project in unreal lately, and ran into the desire to enumerate a list of blueprint assets from a folder. This post has a simple solution.

I looked around and found this post which covers finding UClass from a type, native or from assets, but didn't feel right for my needs. I then found out about UObjectLibrary and after figuring out some of it's API, found this post which also helped. UObjectLibrary been working well and has lots of neat little helpers in the API for what I wanted, and the code is simple.

The code is at the end of the post.

important notes

Make sure the path you use exists in the cooked data in packaged builds. The project has settings for forcing folders to be cooked, add them there if your code is assuming they exist.

All Content/<folder> paths are referenced as /Game/<folder> when using this. Here we have /Game/Trees and /Game/Cards.

The point

Let's say I was doing some procedural generation, and I wanted to spawn some trees (or even whole chunks of a level). These trees can be made into blueprint actors, and spawned dynamically. But how do I get a list of them to spawn from in the first place? That's what we want here, and this is what we'll get.

Type filtering
You'll notice that Type Class filter, this is useful to be specific about the sub class, so that you can cast knowing each result is of the right type.

For example, in my case I have a c++ class called EventCard that all my "card" blueprints inherit from, then I can select it here. Then, I can cast to the specific class and use it as that type, if I wanted to. (This also means you can mix types in the same path/folder, and query only ones that you want).

Spawning
This example also shows how you can take the type and spawn an actor from it. Since the class is just a type of tree, we are now creating one actual tree from it. We can do that several times for the same class, making many from one.

C++ spawning/usage
This code example assumes all my blueprints are inheriting from the c++ class AEventCard, which they are. (see unreal wiki for GetWorld() alternative)

TArray<UClass*> list;  
helper::GetBlueprintsOf(AEventCard::StaticClass(), TEXT("/Game/Trees"), list);  
UClass* cardClass = list[0]; //assume it found one, use the first one  
AEventCard* card = GetWorld()->SpawnActor<AEventCard>(cardClass);  

Code setup

In my case I had two goals:

• I want to use this from c++
• And I want to use to use it from blueprints

The general idea is we want one c++ function, and then one blueprint-facing wrapper function to expose that. The Unreal Wiki has some great examples of exposing stuff to blueprints so I won't get too specific, but I will provide hopefully a clear example of how it'll be setup.

I already have a general purpose blueprint function library in c++, called "TypesAndGlobals", this is where I'll expose it. If you don't have one (and want to use this and don't mind c++ in your project) you would create one from File -> New C++ class and choose Blueprint Function Library as the parent class.

Once the function is exposed then we get this:

The code