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 Andrew Heumann on May 16, 2016 at 4:38am

yes the definition I uploaded exports the PNGs.

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 16, 2016 at 2:26pm

Hi Andrew. I didn't have time to check out your MetaHopper program but today I did! Thanks for the well documented GH program! I was able to visualize the data for a UserObj collection (Alba), and export the PNG icons...

However, I am finding it difficult to export the textual lists data properly. When I use the "stream to file" feature, it messes up the data since many component descriptions are multiline, so I have no idea when one description begins and the other ends. Also, multi-dimensional arrays like the InputParamNames gets "flattened" into a single-dimensional list (ie. the tree structure gets flattened into a list) so I cannot tell which inputs are for which components. Am I making sense?

I even investigated saving to text and saving to JSON, but all I could find was ghJSON which IMO does not save lists to JSON. Anyways I just need a better way to save the data. Do you have any?

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 12, 2016 at 9:19am

Please also recommend good addons for GH that I can add to the docs site!

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 18, 2016 at 8:30am

Hey Harsh - I've strung together some nodes that use the data trees + text nodes to construct xml from the data gathered from the components, params, and user objects. It works like this:

At the end of the definition it lets you write out a text file that should be syntactically valid XML.

Here's what it looks like full of content:

You should be able to customize this to suit your needs - let me know if you run int trouble or have any questions.

Attachments:

ClassDocumentator_3.5.gh, 94 KB

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 18, 2016 at 10:55am

The format is beautiful! After a little bit of fiddling around with the program, I was able to export PNG icons & XML data for a User Object pack, something that was eluding me for a while now! Thanks to you, 7 user object packs and a total of 200 user objects will be added into the website!! Thank you so much!

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 18, 2016 at 11:04am

One small snag, I don't have HDT TreeUtils, so the last part did not execute. I even downloaded an older Human plugin, since it was named HDT Utilities, but Assign Paths is in Human, so I don't understand why GH wants an Assign Paths in HDT.TreeUtils instead. What's going on? Where can I get HDT from? Basically everything works except for the category data.

Permalink Reply by Jaeman PARK on May 16, 2016 at 7:51am

Very useful website. Thanks! I always hoped that this gh3d website would have these pages.

1. Add-on request : Karamba

2. More features request

: How about adding message boards to each component?

and then everybody can share tips how to use the component efficiently.

e.g. Scribble : double-click GH canvas -> Enter a search keyword -> ~ + texts

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 17, 2016 at 3:50am

Working on message boards.

The following are newly added:

- MetaHopper, 1.0, 2016-May-04
- Karamba, 1.1.0, 2015-Mar-14

Permalink Reply by Octavian Catlabuga on May 16, 2016 at 6:27pm

Hi, i really like the site, do you think it is possible to make the site open for user to upload small examples for each component and a more detailed description, something like processing reference? https://www.processing.org/reference/

Permalink Reply by Harsh Gupta on May 17, 2016 at 3:49am

I'm already working on such a feature. Maybe released this week.

Permalink Reply by Christian Schmidts on May 17, 2016 at 8:32pm