compiling a definition?

I don´t know if this has ever been mentioned yet but I think it would be great to have the possibility of being able to only run a gh file as if it were an executable file.

I mean, to have a way to sort of "compile" a file and then run it without having to open it and dealing with the actual "source code".

I hope I have explained myself knowing that I didn´t actually use the proper programming terms.

Cheers!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 3, 2010 at 6:57pm

Hi Miguel,

yes, it's been mentioned a few times. The Remote Control Panel probably takes some of this load (when it's available again anyway), but there are definitely other things we can try in the future. It's not particularly high on the list though.

One thing that is certain is that Grasshopper needs to be installed and loaded for anything like this to work.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by Miguel Vidal on November 4, 2010 at 6:32am

ok, David.

and yes, I assumed that Grasshopper must be installed in the computer.

thanks!

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Golder on November 15, 2010 at 5:45pm

Just to add a thought to this, which would be an amazing feature:
How might it be possible to extract the solution topology of a grasshopper definition? Can it be read from the xml file?
I'm just thinking how neat it might be to explore the potential of making a plugin that could export some illustrations/diagrams of the grasshopper definition in different formats.
For communicating on collaborative design projects, it could be a huge help.

Permalink Reply by Tristan Morgan on November 15, 2010 at 7:12pm

I think this would be great. Was just wondering about the interoperability of the grasshopper xml in terms of co-ordination and collaboration yesterday!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on November 15, 2010 at 7:16pm

Hi Benjamin,

yes, the links are stored in the gh and ghx files, but not a comprehensive fashion. Basically every parameter in the document has an xml node for "SourceCount" and then a list of nodes with the name "Source" and an attribute for the source index. Sources are stored as Guids.

I would highly recommend using the GH_IO.dll to parse gh and ghx files (sure you can load xml, but you won't be able to load binary grasshopper files) as that will provide you with a data structure that is much easier to navigate via code than an Xml document.

You can also read a lot of positional data out of the file, so you know where every component/parameter is anchored and how big it is. What you won't be able to extract is the Icon of the object (unless it is overridden locally).

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Golder on November 15, 2010 at 7:37pm

That's super awesome. Probably won't get around to it for a while, but it would be a really neat thing to start coding with.

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