Component reference for GH

Hi all! I am a GH newbie (although a professional programmer) and I needed a full searchable and browsable list of GH components (documentation), which I could not find anywhere. So, to help myself and everybody, I built this GH component reference site by extracting the list of GH components a while ago.

The advantage of such a list is you can find a component when you know what you want, and don't know the terminology that GH uses. For example to delete/remove items from a list, in GH the term is "cull". Patterns are known as "arrays". While these may be common to GH experts, it takes a while to figure out, and a full component list helps you learn these quickly.

I wanted feedback about this site, and to start discussion about docs in general. AFAIK, docs are largely missing in GH, save the "search" function available within the GH editor. What do you all think? Would you find such a website useful? Would you like it if such docs were integrated into the GH website itself?

Thanks

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 11, 2016 at 10:14pm

Fantastic, thanks forever. That diamond in the sky is closer now.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 12, 2016 at 9:04am

Okay, some exciting updates! The following are newly added:

- Kangaroo, 0.099
- Centipede, 0.7b
- 3DVoronoi, 1.0
- TSplines, 4.0
- Firefly, 1.0.0.70
- TT Toolbox, 1.7

The following plugins are buggy. They have components with duplicating GUIDs (when each compo in them should have a unique GUID). This causes GH to export the help file improperly. I will try Andrew's method of extracting component metadata for these later this week.

- FabTools, 0.92
- Alba, 0.111
- Xylinus, 0.2
- Phyllomachine, 1.0
- Peacock, 1.0

Permalink Reply by Scott Davidson on May 10, 2016 at 12:47pm

Might there be a way to add a page table of contents at the top? It could link to bookmarks on the page.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 11, 2016 at 10:31am

Good idea. I'll investigate how to do that.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 17, 2016 at 3:51am

I've added a JS-based TOC on the left side. Check out the latest version.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on May 17, 2016 at 5:33pm

"Eroticism, like hallucinogenic drugs, like atomic sciences, like Gaudi's gothic architecture, like my love of gold, comes down to a common denominator: God is present in everything. There is the same magic at the heart of things and all roads lead to the same revelation; we are all children of God and the whole universe tends towards the perfection of the human being." - Salvador Dali (The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, 1942)

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 18, 2016 at 1:20am

Very very cool! Thanks for the updates!

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 11, 2016 at 7:27am

Thanks for this - looks like a really useful resource!! It's very nicely formatted as well.

You might want to regenerate in a way that excludes components that are hidden from the toolbar (the component's "Exposure" value = GH_Exposure.Hidden) - otherwise we wind up with components that are not available to users / obsolete showing up in the documentation! In the "Human" section for instance there are three copies of "Create Attributes" even though only one shows up in the toolbar, and "Pass Sequentially" is a component I never got working so never included (even though it's in the codebase). Even in the native libraries you've got components showing up that don't properly "Exist" for users - like "RealTime," all the old "Merge" components, and "Poincare Mapping."

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 11, 2016 at 10:31am

Please tell me how to read the component data directly from the in memory objects? Currently I have to jump through hoops, parsing the HTML generated by "Export Help", parsing the DLLs and other crazy stuff. I'm in C#. Can I access the GH component list directly? You seem to know how. Regards.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 11, 2016 at 12:34pm

Hi Harsh - I've made an updated version of the script I posted here: http://www.grasshopper3d.com/profiles/blogs/auto-document-gh-libraries - that can hopefully give you all the info you need to construct the documentation automatically. Let me know if there's any info you need for the documentation that's missing!! I'm happy to be a part of helping this effort. The attached definition requires metahopper (library attached as well.)

Attachments:

ClassDocumentator_2.0.gh, 13 KB
MetaHopper.gha, 185 KB

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 12, 2016 at 7:02am

Hey Harsh - here's an updated version that includes user object info.

Attachments:

ClassDocumentator_2.5.gh, 23 KB

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 12, 2016 at 9:06am

That's very cool. Do you export the PNG icons in any form? Is such a thing even possible? Because a many important plugins crash David's export help feature, and so I'll need to depend on your method for these. (FabTools, Xylinus, Phyllo, etc)

I need the PNG icons to display the components nicely on the site and to help users recognize them.