Drawn Object Names

[Smewhen]

Current names are automatically assigned an Object + numeric name based on how many previous objects have been created, perhaps giving users the ability to control or set names for objects.

[stapleCamel]

Right now, if I remember correctly, the shape database uses the shape's name as a unique identifier. We can certainly allow users to customize shape names, but we'll need something else then to track shapes uniquely.

[Syntaf]

as @stapleCamel said, the shape names are used as a unique identifier. If we remove this attribute and allow people to use their own identifiers, we will inevitably run into name conflicts when databases are merged and such.

We could make the ID internal, and allow users to see the assigned names in the database and not care about duplicate names. If no unique name is given we can assign it the internal ID

[kdottiemo]

That's what I'm thinking. Front-facing ID is editable but remains the default/rear-facing if no change is made.

[Syntaf]

One important thing to note is a change like this breaks backwards compatibility (i'll make a tag for that), the database won't be able to be migrated if we release a new version with this change. I doubt it a problem right now though, with our whopping user base of ~1 (probably closer to 0).

Agreed w/ @kdottiemo , that should be the way to proceed.

[stapleCamel]

For the rear-facing ID, I was thinking of generating random unique id's for each shape. Python already has a module for generating UUIDs which we can use.

[Syntaf]

@stapleCamel That sounds like it would be a better solution than currently. if I remember correctly, here's what is done atm:

• Program starts up, db.py searching the current database for the highest numbered shape using the ID field
• The highest number + 1 becomes the first id to start on for new shapes created
• During a database merge, one database is selected as the parent db and the other db has it's ID's appended to the highest number of the original database

If we implement names, we could simply assign a unique number to the ID field and never have to worry about conflicts of backend id's.