[PD-dev] presets, a proposal

[guenter geiger]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
> hi Frank,
>
> these changes are for enabling external devs to code [preset],
> [state], etc.
>
> [preset]'s user would just create a [preset] object, and click
> (shift-click for storing) on its slots, or control the thing with
> messages.

Hi

It is a good thing to have an official API for saving state. In the case
of state the API doesn't really help (Well, it does if I wanted to save
the sliders and GUIs from PD, but this is not the main problem yet).

The important question is how to make the system robust against
later edits of the patch and how to make it possible to include
more than one abstraction that has state saving in a patch.

This can not be solved with the object position and class name.
Position has the problem that you can not move the object afterwards,
the class name is too general (there will be only few, number, slider,
toggle).

My experience when working with state is, that most of the time you
do not want all the GUI's to be saved. This let me to the idea that
in order to make one of the GUI objects save its state, it should have
an unique identifier (more than position and class name), one that can
be set in the settings dialog.

If every object has a settable "save-symbol", we solve both problems.
Only objects with save-symbols are saved, and we can identify them
upon loading easily.

The next problem is with multiple abstractions of the same type in one
patch. In this case, the state(preset . whatever) itself has a parameter
that can be changed per abstraction (either as an argument or via a set
message). This way we can distinguish several abstractions.

This would mean the addition of a save_symbol for every saveable object
within pd, together with the API K. suggested.

Does this make sense ?

Guenter

>
> k
>
> Frank Barknecht wrote:
> ...
> > Not that I really understand your patch fully, but does statefn also
> > handle setting the state again afterwards? Or is this still only
> > possible through the standard ways to set an internal state, i.e.
> > through inlets or messages?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PD-dev mailing list
> PD-dev at iem.at
> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-dev
>