Hi there!
After a long time, I'm finally getting my feet back into the Gaffer world and I had two basic questions that will have an impact on how to approach things in the upcoming weeks.
I'm wondering how "easy" it is to implement a custom value plug. I can't see any Python example in Gaffer's source code. So, I'm wondering if that is a restriction or more a performance reason. I would like to have a custom plug for displaying production and publish data on my nodes, it's not for any computation of the node's data. I might come along with only a custom widget and using existing plugs, but I thought it would be worth asking the question. In general, I would like to avoid starting implementing stuff in C++ (quite rusty on my end).
My second question is about custom data flowing around in the Gaffer graph. We have a publish data dependency system that makes sure to keep track of down- and upstream publishes. Since Gaffer is super-dynamic with its context system, I absolutely can't rely on connected nodes to detect upstream data. My idea was to 'inject' our internal uids of any loaded data into the graph, and when rendering out, I get all 'injected' uids that end up to the render node. Is that doable with only Python? I'm also wondering how merges would happen. Ideally, I would like to have all 'uids' merged together, like a 'set' data structure.
Thanks for any input!
Greets,
Carlo