Use Case:
I created a new midi input block with some custom event filtering I wanted to use in all my rackspaces. I created the block, and saved as a favourite. When editing each rackspace I wasn’t able to simply replace the existing midi block with my favourite, I had to delete the existing block with connections, and add then connect the favourite block. Onerous when you have a lot of rackspaces…
Bonus feature:
Expand the ‘Replace’ function to include a ‘Replace in all rackspaces?’ prompt when replacing input / output blocks. This would make the use case above super easy.
OR
Introduce concept of ‘Shared Blocks’ - which are a new user favourite type which when edited updates all rackspaces where the shared block is in use.
Don’t really see why that would be a problem… would have thought replacing one block with a favourite that composes of multiple blocks wouldn’t be too complicated - in my simple mind it’s just adding the additional block(s) to the flow connected as they were saved in the favourite, and then connecting the nodes at the start and end of the favourite exactly the same as replacing with a single plugin…
And what if there is more than a single node at the top, perhaps because the user who saved the favorite wants to connect different things to each top node? Would you connect to the first one? The second one? All of them?
Well I did say it was my simple view of things! You’re quite right, in that scenario there wouldn’t be an easy way to automatically work out where the connection should be made. If there was more than one option I guess an easy solution would be to leave it to the user to make the connection(s) after the replace operation - would still be easier than deleting the existing block / adding a new block / making the connection(s), and would work automatically with favourites that only had one input / output choice.
See, there also could be the scenario where a user favourite might have not only more than one pair of in/out but rather has multiple plugin blocks at it’s ends - then there would not only be the question of which in/out to use but also which plugin should be connected to what…
So if it should be left to the user to decide which cables have to be drawn where, he also simply could delete the old plugin, insert the new favourite and just do the re-cabeling (which he had to do anyway).
In my opinion, because it’s impossible to find a common rule for every scenario, the resulting amount of “work” is neclectible for the user.
OK, not getting a lot of love for the suggestion… that’s fair enough! It’s true that if the favourite has multiple in / out points the replace is not going to save as much time as if the favourite has one in / out.
For me personally, it was a pain having to update over 200 input blocks without being able to use the replace functionality (for a favourite with one in / out). Hopefully I won’t need to do it again…