Hi everyone,

I know it has been discussed a lot already, but the cool GUI tricks that have been explored so far are definitely getting the best of me.
I've tried to do the switching and expanding of graph on parent objects that showed up in this post's attachments:
http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-2996-once-again-graph-parent-question
but it just leaves me with more questions.

Every time I expand/contract or move the area of the canvas, the objects that should now be covered remain there (and persist even after the sub-patch they are in no longer exist). So I assume that the objects in the sub-patch would need to be made before the sub-patch itself so the canvas can cover them. (The syntax of that sentence is mind-boggling this late at night)
So as an experiment, I went into the control examples and tried to make a canvas out of sub-patches that are separate .pd files, and each time I did, pd crashed.
I'm in Vista with 0.40.3-extended.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

i don't think anyone mentioned this in the recent threads. but it might be good to remember that these 'gui features' are not supported functions of pd. they are more like 'hacks', and cannot be guaranteed to work. pd's gui is a bit dodgy even when used normally, but when you try to force hacks on it, crashes and troubles can be expected.

that said, it's not as if you're going to trigger a global thermonuclear war via a pd patch, so there's not much harm in messing round with this stuff. You just can't really depend on it.

could you please attach a patch of what you want to do and add some comments what in fact is not working? my english is not so good, so i don't understand what you mean in your first post. but i'm also interested in finding more of these gui hacks!
did you try the out the patch i posted in the mentioned thread in my second post?

@evilsheep23 said:

Every time I expand/contract or move the area of the canvas, the objects that should now be covered remain there (and persist even after the sub-patch they are in no longer exist).

Here's the trick: If you open the subpatch on the patch you posted here, and select all, you'll see there's a canvas at the background of the part of the patch that is expanded/contracted. Putting a canvas at the background that is big enough to cover all of the objects that you need to show/hide solves the problem you've mentioned.

There is another problem though: If you have some other objects on the main patch that are located exactly where the subpatch is being expanded to, as soon as you expand the subpatch, they disappear and never come back until you erase the subpatch! It's because the hidden canvas somehow remains in there. You can of course adjust the size of it, so it expands/contracts together with the pacth, but in that case the objects that are supposed to be hidden reappears on the main patch! I don't know how to deal with this... Making another subpatch inside the subpatch that includes all of the objects, then moving the entire thing maybe, which I don't know-how though...

After playing with it a bit, I figured out the whole canvas thing. What I did was make it send messages to expand/contract a white canvas over the area in the sub-patch with [;canvas delta ...( and [;canvas size ...( messages. It worked for covering it on the main patch.
I don't have a file to post though, because I realized that it doesn't matter if I can expand/contract the visible area on the sub-patch if I can't move the sub-patch around the main patch too. So I nuked the whole setup and accepted that I'm doomed to have a cluttered interface for my sampler.
Of course, if anyone knows a message that will move a sub-patch in the main patch, that would get me out of interface purgatory...