Generic (non library related) way of indicating the nature of a LDraw file

[Roland Melkert]

Hi all,

I kinda sparked a discussion about how to determine if a file is a part or not in

http://forums.ldraw.org/showthread.php?tid=503,503

Resulting of that I think there is a need for a way of indicating the goal of a document similar to the !LDRAW_ORG meta, but for private or 3rd party documents instead. This meta can then be used by software to do goal depended preparations.

Maybe something like:

0 !NATURE < model | part | shortcut | alias >

or

0 !HINT [ docNature=<model | part | shortcut | alias> ]

The second one is more advanced / generic and opens the door to adding more stuff in the future.

I know the first one has overlap with !LDRAW_ORG but like tore said in the above mentioned thread, it suggests 'ldraw.org owns this' which isn't very friendly if it's your own private creation.

It's also possible to get the information from keywords and or comment lines in the header, but that isn't fool proof parsing wise imho.

What do you think?

[Orion Pobursky]

Interesting. I'd go with 0 !FILE_TYPE. This may clear up a few issue but, as we saw with ldconfig.ldr, a new meta depends on support for the program authors.

[Roland Melkert]

!FILE_TYPE might be a more clearly keyword.

no offense but I think you should post in the models and parts section due to you not being a current LSC member and so (taking in account all the fuzz about committee sections and their associated access rights etc).

[Orion Pobursky]

I just realized that I replied here and I'm not on the LSC. My admin permissions allow me to do this and I didn't pay attention to the forum I was posting into. Sorry.

[Travis Cobbs]

I like 0 !FILE_TYPE. I'm not completely opposed to Tore's 0 !LDRAW suggestion, but I think 0 !FILE_TYPE has the advantage of being focused, along with solving this specific problem.

[Allen Smith]

Roland Melkert Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Resulting of that I think there is a need for a
> way of indicating the goal of a document similar
> to the !LDRAW_ORG meta, but for private or 3rd
> party documents instead. This meta can then be
> used by software to do goal depended
> preparations.

The goal here is to identify inlined parts in MPD models?

The problem I've always had is that in an editor, there isn't actually any difference between an inlined "part" and another submodel. The user can change the inlined part at a moment's notice, just as he can change any other submodel. I've just had to work around the limitation as best as possible, with the result being that inlined parts degrade performance a bit.

Allen