Aspects

Aspects are mostly used for library development. They allow to:

• Distinguish "standard" from "advanced" and "internal" nodes
• Mark nodes as "obsolete" or "experimental"

In the NodeBrowser aspects can be used to filter nodes.

VL has the following keywords for aspects:

• Advanced
• Internal
• Experimental
• Obsolete
• Adaptive

Advanced

Advanced is probably the most important aspect. The idea behind it is that any library developer provides a few super cool nodes and types that 90% of all users of a library should use. So the developer wants to have these easy to use nodes show up in the node browser by default. Only if a more advanced use case emerges for the user of the library all other nodes and types should be available as well.

In order to do that a library developer can structure their library as they please and then simply place the additional advanced nodes into the category Advanced which informs the NodeBrowser to hide them if the Advanced button is off, which is the default (as seen in the gif above).

The NodeBrowser also has a button to show/hide the 'standard' nodes (which is on by default) to make it easy to check your library for consistency.

Internal

With this aspect the library developer can fine grain the node visibility even further.

Internal makes nodes and types only available inside the .vl document that defines them. It can be used for all little utils and helpers that wouldn't make sense in a different context and should not be "exposed" by the document when it gets referenced by another document.

Obsolete and Experimental

These two should be used for past and future nodes.

Nodes that are not yet finished or are proof of concept for a new technology should be placed in the category Experimental. These nodes have to be used with care since they might be unstable or will have breaking changes in the future.

Obsolete is quite self explanatory, nodes with this aspect are only there to maintain backwards compatibility and should not be used anymore because there is probably newer/better version available.

Adaptive

You can create an adaptive category anywhere and it will add all node signatures inside it to the adaptive system, so every type can implement such a node. e.g. the adaptive operators +, -, *, /, =, ... are placed in the Math.Adaptive category, which makes them show up under Math in the NodeBrowser.

There are different ways to apply aspects to nodes:

Specifying aspects for groups of nodes

Using Categories with any of the above keywords as names, allows you to apply aspects to all nodes defined within the category.

Note that even though specified as categories, aspects do not contribute to a nodes actual full category. So for example categories MyLibrary.Particles.Advanced or MyLibrary.Advanced.Particles will simply become MyLibrary.Value.

In a tooltip aspects are clearly distinguished from categories:

Specifying an aspect for a single datatype definition

For a Process, Record or Class, aspects can be set via the Patch Explorer.

Aspects assigned to a type, also apply to all its nested elements!

Specifying an aspect for a single operation

To specify an aspect for a single operation, simply use the keyword in the Version part of an operation name, like:

GetBytes (Advanced) or Transform (Normal Advanced)