Define a Custom MetaNode

Introduction

A plugin may wish to define its own metanodes if it wants to store data in the tree in a structure not accommodated by any other metanodes.

For more information, see the Metanodes section of the API.

Example

For our example we will define a metanode to describe the location of a PDF file and a page number. On its own this will not do anything other than provide a way of storing this data. The section on Observers details ways to respond to instances of this metanode.

HMeta m = VRCreateMetaNode("PDF");
VRAddPropertyFile(m, "File", "PDF Files|*.pdf");
VRAddPropertyInt(m, "Page", 1);
VRFinishMetaNode(m);

Creating the node in Visionary Render

In order to keep this simple, we will create an instance of this node using the Lua console in Visionary Render.

Enter the following into the console and press Ctrl + E to run it.

vrCreateNode(vrTreeRoot().Libraries, "PDF", "PDF")

The node will appear in the Libraries tree. Notice how its properties are immediately editable using the automatically generated properties display. The appearance of the properties can be customised with Semantics.