Is it possible to dynamically create and and locally store an instance of an abstraction within a session? Specifically, I want to create one abstraction patch for a synthesizer, then be able to create and reference an arbitrary number of those instances. I know one way I could emulate this is just create a bunch of object boxes for the abstraction, and only instantiate them when needed, which means the limit of instances being how many ever objects I create in the main patch before hand. In practice, this would actually work fine as I most likely will never need more than 20 instances or so, but just wanted to know if there is a more elegant way to do this.

thanks.

I'm a little confused about what you mean by store (because abstractions can't save settings on their own easily) but it is certainly possible. also I hear the many library is quite useful for many instances of the same object. If you don't do that, just use the pd message system to dynamically create objects. (doc/Manuals/pd-msg) if you want to dynamically patch the connections you may need canvasindex from iemguts to keep track of the indexes. what I would do in your case is have [receive]s for each instance and use a counter and makefilename to change the receive name when you create a new instance so you can easily send to a specific instance

Something like this maybe?

Start with testBuildParent.pd. Both of the patches need to be in the same path for this example.

edit: fixed a little thing in the patch to make it clearer.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/testBuildFiles.zip

thanks for the replies and examples. i didn't know you could dynamically create patches from templates like in the testBuildFiles. i ended up just settling for a limited number of pre-defined instances because it works for my purposes.

thanks.