Hi! I'm fairly new to Pure Data, but I've made a few assorted guitar effect patches. In short, I have written a python script that sends a patch name to Pure Data with the pdsend command. (For examples sake, let's say this name is 'overdrive') Pure Data receives the name just fine using a [Netreceive] object in a server patch that I wrote, and I can print it using [print]. What I want to do is be able to take this received name and pipe it into an object box to open it as an abstraction. I tried doing something like this, thinking that the $1 would act as variables do in python, or another language:

[Netreceive 5000]
|
[$1]

But it doesn't work. Instead of an abstraction opening, I get an error:
"float: no method for 'overdrive'"

I know that I can open a subpatch like this:
[;pd open $1.pd /home/user/(

But this isn't what I want to do. I want to have an abstraction that I can pipe audio into, have it come out an outlet, pipe it back into another abstraction, and so on. I guess you could say I want to make a patch bay, of sorts.
So to summarize:
Instead of opening an abstraction by typing in the name of a patch like this:
[overdrive]
I want to open one with a variable in place of a static file name.
Is this even possible? If so, how would I go about it? I feel like I'm missing something really obvious...
I hope this makes sense and thanks in advance,
-Ben

Thanks! This helped a lot.
-Ben