Hi Chris,
It does raise another question -- is this a common practice and is there anywhere else in OSG where node name has a special meaning during specific phases of operation?
I tend to think that any use of user-settable properties, such as node name, callbacks, user data, etc. inside OSG is potentially dangerous. Any app could potentially change the node's name, remove/replace a callback or user data and that would break the library's behavior, and the only way to know why it's broken is to go delve into OSG's source.
For callbacks, it's pretty easy to instead derive a node type and override the traverse() method. That way it's much harder for the user to break expected behavior of the node (they would need to derive from this node type, override traverse() and forget to call the base class version). For name and user data, I don't see an easy way to avoid using them if OSG already uses them in some cases... But in any case, identifying nodes by name always strikes me as unsafe.
Since we use visitors so often in OSG coding, OSG itself can't assume that any node is hidden from the user, and so can't assume that user-settable properties won't be changed by the user...
This doesn't really help you, but I wanted to be more detailed than just saying "I agree".
J-S -- ______________________________________________________ Jean-Sebastien Guay [email protected] http://www.cm-labs.com/ http://whitestar02.webhop.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
