[Bf-taskforce25] data api proposal

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi Kent,

On Mon, 2008-09-29 at 10:31 -0500, Kent Mein wrote:
> One thing on the basic types, multiple choice There are a couple of types of
> these, one were you can only select one and one where you can select
> many.		Two quick examples would be: osa level   vs
> 			the bank of render options shadow/sss/pano etc..
> 
> The second we could do with making them all seperate but, do we want to
> do that or not?

I think they should be separate settings. This is why I proposed the
grouping of properties, which is basically a hint for the UI or
documentation, without effect on the data level.

> I also wonder if we shouldn't make default types of vert and or a list
> of verts.  The only reason I mention this is because they are use pretty
> exensively and if we don't have the default types we will have lots of
> multiple interfaces in type struct?

Personally I'd say no, because it is hard to see where this would end.
There are verts for meshes, nurbs, with different properties, etc. Not
sure what you mean by multiple interfaces, .. but I think code sharing
would be possible if there are similar data structures in multiple
places.

> There are probably some others that might make sense as well.
> 
> Jumping back to default types, in the GUI we have multiple ways of
> showing a float(Slider, box with arrows on each end), multiple choice
> also has various ways(expandable list, buttons layed out, three way
> toggles, Map To in a texture Emit for example...)
> For the most part I think they should not be implemented at the
> type level but something to be aware of....

The default value, that is something I didn't include in the proposal
indeed. If we want a function to reset to the default we'll need it.
Would be good if we could avoid duplicating them from all the add_*
functions in blenkernel/, but should be possible I think.

About multiple ways of showing the data, this is what I added subtypes
for, and flags could be set for it as well. How that works in practice
will be some puzzling though to get the right subtypes, flags or other
settings figured out.

Thanks for the feedback,
Brecht.