Feedback on "nice to have" grasshopper features

[labrosse (Mark Labrosse)]

Hi guys

I’ve now had some time to explore Pollination and run some simulations.
First of, thanks for making this! The decrease in time for computations is increadible!

Working on my script, I found a few features, which might be nice to implement, though not being urgent

Creating projects in grasshopper
At the moment, new PO projects must be created manually in the web app. Would it be possible to create new projects directly from grasshopper?

Also, when a new project is created, there are no available recipes. I do like the possibility of being able to narrow down the recipe options, but I personally feel that it would make more sense if all public recipes were auto-assigned to any new projects. Then an administrator could remove certain recipe manually if necessary.

Error messages in grasshopper
I love that the Check Job Status component shows simulation time. Would it also be possible to add a status (finished/failed) and an error message in case the simulation failed. I generally don’t feel that it is transparent why a simulation has failed, but that might be due to my small insight in programming. Most LBT components give error messages, which I’ve often found super useful.

Connect run to List Jobs component
Daylight simulations are rarely a linear process. You simulate, identify problems, change geometry and run again. Therefore, we will often have run 10-30 variations on a large project before the building complies with the building code. Having a simulation log is hence vital for our process.
I see that the List Jobs component can give an overview of runs and there individual description. But at the moment, List Jobs cannot be connected to Pollinate, so you will have to right-click it and find the current project manually. Could these components be connected? Or maybe the Create Projects function I’ve mentioned above could be used as input here to give an overview of all runs in a given project.

Sensitivity of Pollinate button
I have found that many of my colleagues dobbelt-click on the pollinate button, which starts two runs on the cloud, which steals dobbelt the amount of CPUhours. Would it be possible to make the button less sensitive? That mistake could become expensive in the long run.

I hope that the feedback is useful

Best regards,
Mark

[mostapha]

Hi @labrosse! Thank you for the helpful feedback. Appreciate it!

Creating projects in grasshopper

This is possible. @mingbo and I talked about it before and at the time we decided not to add such a component to keep the number of components to minimum.

Adding the public recipe to project by default

@labrosse

when a new project is created, there are no available recipes.

@labrosse

I personally feel that it would make more sense if all public recipes were auto-assigned to any new projects. Then an administrator could remove certain recipe manually if necessary.

This will give @mingbo an “I told you so!” moment, because he already told me that this is how it should be. This is somewhat the behavior for the personal projects. For those projects the user sees all the recipes and the component adds the recipe to the project automatically if it is not included in the project already.

We decided not to that for the organization projects because it will only work for an owner of the project. Also, we already have more then 20 public recipes and we will have more as we go. Removing the recipes from the UI can become harder than you think.

Here is a solution that might make everyone happy. If we have a component for creating new projects from inside Grasshopper, then we can also have a Boolean to allow adding all the public recipes to the project right after the project is being created. Would that address your needs?

Error messages in Grasshopper

@labrosse

I love that the Check Job Status component shows simulation time. Would it also be possible to add a status (finished/failed) and an error message in case the simulation failed.

I imagine you are aware of the status output on the component. Is your comment in particular about the color of the component? Or the output of the status output is different from what you expect?

Connect run to List Jobs component

I’m not sure if I fully understand your comment on this one. Are you trying to add additional runs to a job? Or are you trying the list of all the jobs in a single project.

I know our selection of jobs and runs can be confusing but to clarify:

• A run is a single simulation.
• A job is a collection of runs that are executed together. A job can have a single run or several runs.
• All the runs under the job should be submitted together. You can’t add or remove runs from a job.

Sensitivity of Pollinate button

I leave this one to @mingbo! I don’t know what’s the best solution for this one.

[labrosse (Mark Labrosse)]

@mostapha

Here is a solution that might make everyone happy. If we have a component for creating new projects from inside Grasshopper, then we can also have a Boolean to allow adding all the public recipes to the project right after the project is being created. Would that address your needs?

This sounds like a neat solution

@mostapha

I imagine you are aware of the status output on the component. Is your comment in particular about the color of the component? Or the output of the status output is different from what you expect?

No, the request was to add a “status” output, but it seems from your picture, that the feature has already been added. I guess that I have an old version of pollination on my machine.

@mostapha

I’m not sure if I fully understand your comment on this one. Are you trying to add additional runs to a job? Or are you trying the list of all the jobs in a single project.

No sorry, my explanation on this one was confusing. My point is that I really like the possibility of being able to view the names on description of each job. The List Jobs component does this but for now, there is no output from any earlier component, which can be used for the “project” input on the List Jobs component. So I will manually need to write a string with “ProjectOwner/ProjectName”. So my point is that if there was a separate component for creating new projects, as mentioned earlier in this thread, the output from a such component could be used as input for the List Jobs component, so that everything could be automated.

But as you may hear, this request is only based on laziness and should hence obviously be a low priority job I am just too lazy to either rewrite the project name as a string input, as shown below, or to right-click the component and browse the correct project manually.

[mostapha]

Hi @labrosse! Thank you for the explanation.

@labrosse

My point is that I really like the possibility of being able to view the names on description of each job. The List Jobs component does this but for now, there is no output from any earlier component, which can be used for the “project” input on the List Jobs component. So I will manually need to write a string with “ProjectOwner/ProjectName”. So my point is that if there was a separate component for creating new projects, as mentioned earlier in this thread, the output from a such component could be used as input for the List Jobs component, so that everything could be automated.

Now I understand your point. Let me talk about this with @mingbo and get back to you. It’s fair to be lazy for something like this!

[mingbo]

Hi @labrosse, I finally get the chance to work on this.
I have just added two components for adding a new project and getting a project and I hope this helps to address your problem.

You can download the latest installer to get the updated Pollination plugin.