App Inputs and Outputs
General knowledge about Swarm App Inputs and Outputs
Last updated
General knowledge about Swarm App Inputs and Outputs
Last updated
Since Apps are made from Grasshopper definitions, all App Inputs and Outputs are of Grasshopper’s common data types; Booleans, Numbers, Strings, Points, Curves, Surfaces, BREPs, and Meshes. Certain UI elements in Grasshopper - sliders, toggles, and dropdown lists - are supported as interactive inputs as well.
This makes great sense and works very well in Rhino, but gets more complex in Revit, Illustrator, and pretty much anywhere else Swarm touches down in the future. We knew this to be true at the outset of the project: Each Swarm Desktop Client has its own built-in interoperability problem; data types in the desktop application have to be mapped on to Swarm’s Input/Output types. These mappings make more sense in some cases than in others.
Illustrator paths = Swarm Curves (with attributes for color, stroke weight, etc.); Area elements in SAP = Swarm Meshes (with attributes for Section, Material, etc); Wall elements in Revit can be either = mesh or a curve (with Revit Parameters as Attributes attached to both);
And so on…
Please see the data type mapping sections in the Desktop Clients section for more details on this topic.