Storing persistent data with Workflow tools

[michaelharmonart]

Now that I've finally got workflow tools up an running I'm setting up a little UI for a bunch of the rigging scripts I run regularly.

One example of a manual rigging task is taking a big list of joints and parenting them to a big list of controls.
Usually I just run commands to store the current selection into variables and then pass those into a little function to do the parenting for me. But with NXT its not as simple. I wonder what the best way to have a button store some information based on the current selection is, such that another button can use that data to do some work

[ImLucasBrown]

There are a few ways to keep persistent data with workflow tools. NXT works really hard to clean up after itself and throw data away on re-comps. You can disable re-comps when workflow tools execute by unchecking Execute > Workflow Tools Always Recomp, however that may not be enough for your case.
Each graph (tab) has a global STAGE object available, but keep in mind STAGE is flushed after each execution/comp. So to store data that is persistent as long as NXT is open (and across graphs) you need to set it on a module, I've attached a graph showing this. Remember though, modules are not scoped to graphs, if you mess with data from one graph, other graphs can access it, NXT only flushed the global name pointing to modules, not the actual module itself.

Tl;dr if you need very persistent data:

• Double click your layer to open the "world node" and import a module, e.g.
  import nxt
• In the node you'd like to set data with, create an attribute on the nxt module, e.g. nxt.my_data = {}
  • You can place anything you want on a module attibute, but I strongly recommend prefixing or namspacing your attribute so you don't inadvertently break NXT and loose work.
• In any node, even after recomp, you can access the nxt.my_data
• See example graph (rename .json to .nxt)