Python attributes.add poor performance

[philip.marivoet]

Hi,

In my python extension I need to add an attribute to a fairly large number of sketchPoints and sketchLines.

For this I use the following code:

@timed
def tag(elements, finger_id, master=False):
    if not finger_id:
        return

    info("Tagging {} elements", len(elements))
    value = 'M' if master else 'C'

    for element in elements:
        element.attributes.add(ATTRIBUTE_GROUP, finger_id, value)

This is very slow, e.g. tagging 230 elements this way takes 150 seconds!

Any suggestion on how to do this faster ?

Thanks,

Philip

[goyals]

Not sure this can be speed up unless you can consider applying the attribute on complete sketch rather than on individual entity in sketch.

[philip.marivoet]

I need a way to record which elements were created by my extension so I can update them later if needed. I do this by adding an attribute to each element so I can find them back later.

Maybe there is another, better way to track these elements, but I could not find it.

[JeromeBriot]

Hello,

did you try with an ObjectCollection object ?

[philip.marivoet]

Is there an API call to set an attribute on multiple elements using an ObjectCollection (I could not find it) ?

[JeromeBriot]

I don't think so.

I thought that instead of setting attibutes to the elements, you could store the elements in different groups.

But maybe that's not what you expect?

[philip.marivoet]

I now use attributes to:

 - track which elements were generated

 - what parameters were used to generate them

To track the elements I generate an group id (UUID) and use this as the attribute name which I then set on all elements. This way I can use the findAttributes() method of the Design object to find back all elements which is a lot faster than scanning all elements in the sketch for a specific attibute value.

I use attributes because this information has to be persisted.

I managed to speed up most other steps by using Design class methods and ObjectCollection but setting the attributes is still slow (and I see no reason why it should be, this is just setting some <key, value> on an object as far as I can tell).

Philip