drag and drop definitions

This is a feature request. I'm not requesting clusters but I think I need to mention them.
Grasshopper used to have clusters... in my opinion they were fantastic, not because they were well implemented (sorry David) but because I thought it gave a glimpse of what could happen in the future. Being able to construct and collapse pieces of the process into your own reusable components is a huge time saver and it also could promote custom component sharing.

OK I said this wasn't about clusters but it is almost the same. What if you could drag and drop definitions into the canvas? Something like document merging but with two simple changes.

1.It drops where you want in the canvas
2.It is automatically contained in a group

With this feature the user can start to build his own library of reusable generic processes. Form explorer he can and drop them in the canvas like components but instead it creates groups.

In the same logic the user should be able to save a group as a definition. Some useful features could be added later to this, for example if two or more components inside the group are connected to one component outside the group the definition is saved with a place holder of the appropriate type, in order to preserve the connections.

The sharing could be centralized and the most used/downloaded definitions can be later transformed into proper optimized components.

that's it, should be simple yet very powerful.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 16, 2010 at 9:06am

Hi Frane,

this is easy enough to implement. The question is, how does it tie in with clusters. At the moment I require special Cluster inputs and outputs to be defined. This is by no means fixed and there's a lot of places where I can jump in and automatically add these (as indeed I do when a portion of a network if clusterified).

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

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on October 16, 2010 at 9:37am

I wondered what those arrows on your 0.8.001 screen shot were.

I think it would certainly be easier to define a simpler cluster input or output by extracting the parameter from a multiple wired node. But I think it definitely has merits to simply swap a component for another by extracting the parameter with wires attached and then deleting the component.

Permalink Reply by Frane Zilic on October 16, 2010 at 10:26pm

I see that the problem is when the user want to create a cluster from scratch. I was thinking that the user should define inputs and outputs manually by right clicking on a primitive or geometry component and set it to this special condition. That's why I was focusing on that extract parameter modification. Now I see that it is even better if any connection can be set as input/output but still I think it should be manual, at least at the start... maybe later you can add "intelligence" to it.
Still the extract parameter modification is useful. Maybe not for solving inputs and outputs but it is a time saver to easily create reusable groups and clusters.