Storing data between different plug-ins

Rhino Developer
1

Say I have a plug-in (A) that does something simple like just inverting the face normals and stores them as a vector (or some other data structure)

Is there a way one can use this later on in Plug-in (B) run later that uses those pre-calculated values to do some fancy shading operations?

Essentially I am not sure how to store the data so plug-in (B) can use what plug-in (A) calculated.

I know in other programs there are notions of ‘nodes’ vs ‘commands’ and you can plug a nodes output into another’s to get this value, but not sure if Rhino has this DAG notion underneath?

2

Would “user data” do it for you? Plugins can store their own data in the 3dm document.

3

Have a read of this thread if UserData appeals:

4

There is a way to share plug-in user data between other plug-ins. Just keep in mind that one and only one plug-in is responsible for reading and writing the user data to 3DM files.

You will need to create a shared assembly that is referenced by all plug-ins that need access to the data.

I can work you up a sample if needed…

5

I don’t really ever want to write the data, I mostly want to have it around to do calculations in steps
so a user can constantly be modifying a mesh, and it caculates the new data

then when they want to render it … it is there for plugin 2

I did not see an example for an shared assembly did I miss it?

6

See if this sample is helpful (or not)…

https://github.com/dalefugier/SampleCsSharedData