I’m probably the only one in the office using Rhino… My colleagues are using Revit. Very few of them know Dynamo, but probably most if not everybody would know how to utilize a simple Dynamo script using Dynamo Player. Even for my personal needs sometimes I feel better with the simple, small GUI than toggling things in the Grasshopper window - sometimes my definitions are a bit messy, but other times they can be very tidy too - so it’s not really a matter of tidiness.
I would like to prepare GH Revit scripts for people that they can use themselves and they will not be scared or overwhelmed by yet another program, I believe a good GUI can save them from that. Consider that even Rhino and Grasshopper windows are not acting in a very predictable manner, especially on two monitors.
Currently, I’m sometimes using Metahopper to enable/disable components, I’m glad that there is a plugin like that, but I think it’s a bit strange to rely on this abandoned plugin to control something as crucial as committing transactions to Revit. Being able to control this thing more remotely, either from the other side of the GH canvas or from the custom GUI (like Synapse, HumanUI, Ui+) is helpful.
tl;dr
Saying all that…
Is there a chance that you will add some optional boolean inputs that will control transactions for the RiR components? If not, what makes it a bad idea? Rhino 8 Content Cache component seems to work fine with such a possibility. Anybody having the same need?
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One good thing about enabling/disabling components traditionally is that they change color to grey which makes them easy to distinguish. RiR already incorporated a black color to show transactions. Maybe having boolean input instead would require to have yet another color.
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I don’t know if this is possible, or to what extent, but the RiR component that is not disabled and is not committing transactions could output a prediction of what will happen - this is more about seeing what data trees are going to make with the input data without the need of committing transaction. Maybe this idea is a stretch…