Understanding Decompose Group

Basic Usage

A decompose group operation allows you to access the immediate children of an object that is some kind of ObjectGroup. The operation's outputs hold data that is shared with the input, so no copying is made. The operation is essentially providing handles to the existing data, or put another way, it is decomposing it into its child objects for easier access. When changing the data type for a DecomposeGroup operation, the set of outputs will be re-created to reflect the structure of the new data type and any connections to the old outputs will be deleted. It is normal practice to create a DecomposeGroup operation, set its data type (and optionally its name) and then leave it like that.

DecomposeGroup operations are meant to be used for data types that are ObjectGroup subclasses. You should avoid using them for any data types that dynamically change their own grouping structure. At time of writing, no such dynamically changing ObjectGroup subclasses exist in the workspace, but it is possible this may change in the future. If in doubt, consult the documentation for the data type of interest. If nothing is mentioned there, it should be safe to use it with DecomposeGroup.

See also

Polymorphic Operations, ComposeGroup