Custom input to Path Mapper

1. It would be nice to be able to right-click and disconnect input as you can on all other components, don't know if it's intended.

2. Is there a plan to add the possibility to extract placeholders from the Path Mapper component, something like below. Oh, its a bit of a photoshop collage and I know that the asterix isn't allowed, but I hope it shows what I'm looking for.

/Cheers and thank you for an awesome tool.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 2, 2010 at 7:24am

Hi Mattias,

1. I suppose the reason I left out the Disconnect menu items is because I figured people would only use the PathMapper on a single wire at a time. I'll add those menu items for consistencies sake.

2. I'm confused about this request. When would you use this kind of setup and what would you be able to do that you couldn't do with a single input/output mapper? I'm not saying the wish is pointless or redundant, I just don't get it.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Mattias Eriksson on January 2, 2010 at 8:37am

What I have been doing before is some conditional branching like below. However, it's still possible to do it though vb-components, but it would be so easy if the Path Mapper allowed you to do this:

/Mattias

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 2, 2010 at 11:41pm

Ah I get it now! You want to input actual values so you can use them in the mask expression. Well, this won't work at all right now because the PathMapper reads data structures, not values. For it to read both kinds of data would be a break with some fundamental behavioral rules in the Grasshopper core.

However, I have a suggestion. What if I were to make a new kind of object, which would place a numeric value (or a point, or vector, or boolean, or String) into the 'global' scope of a Grasshopper document. Then you could use that constant in all expressions that are part of that document, be they PathMapper masks, ExpressionComponents, Parameter Inline expressions etc. etc.

There may be some issues when a constant is the result of an intricate calculation which in turn involves other constants, as it becomes hard to determine the order in which to solve them, but in clear-cut cases like the image you posted (nice quality btw :) it shouldn't be a problem.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Mattias Eriksson on January 3, 2010 at 12:10am

Yeah, that would work too, I'll have to admit that I did look through the note to see if it was a way to enter a constant somewhere.

/Mattias

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