Store List Data

So, I'm currently referencing surfaces in Rhino and creating a list of their layers. My problem is I would like to be able to automatically store this list in grasshopper, so upon referencing a new set of Rhino layers I could compare both lists and see if there's been any layers added or removed within my new selection.

I understand I can make this data persistent by simply copying and pasting the original list into a panel, but I was hoping there was some way to do this automatically in grasshopper as I may be referencing rhino layers multiple times.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 16, 2016 at 9:58am

Data Recorder? Not particularly easy to use since it's hard to know how many states it records, but it's the only thing which retains states from one solution to another.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 16, 2016 at 10:00am

To elaborate, what I would do is convert all layers into a single piece of text, for example by concatenating them using some symbol like % or & or # or \\. Then you data record these strings. On the other end of the data recorder you can use Create Set to weed out any identical records, and after that split apart your text again into loose names. At least this way you only have to deal with individual pieces of data, rather than lists of layer names.

Permalink Reply by Justin on June 16, 2016 at 10:39am

Thanks for the quick response! I was considering using the data recorder but wasn't quite sure how it worked. Instead I've used the "Store" component from the "Generation" plug-in which is very similar to your suggestion of concatenating the list into a single piece of text, store it in a list, then split the text back into a multiple lists for comparison.

But I'm going to give the data recorder a shot as well, thanks again David!

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