Accessing editing, removing and adding data in your blend file is one of the most important aspects in creating your addons. Because blend files contain a lot of different data it is also one of the more complex areas of scripting. You have to get used to how blender stores and handles data, what types of data exist and how they interact with each other.
With Serpens we try to make this process easier and more visual. That said, it is still something that you will have to work with and understand, especially if you create your own properties which we will go into later.
The Blend Data Browser is our way of visualizing the data in your blend file. You can find the button to open the browser in the Serpens editors header.
You will notice that the browser is opened in the preferences window. You can also open it side by side with your node editor if you prefer that workflow. To go back to the preferences, click the Exit button in the top left corner.
You can find the overall navigation of the browser on the left. Here you also have global filters. The data is displayed on the rest of the window. You can see the name and type of the data and expand items with the arrow button to get the child data of an item.
This contains most of blenders stored data. You will find objects, images, node groups, materials and so on in here. Most of these are collections. In the case of blender data, a collection just means multiple data items grouped together. There is for example a collection of all objects in your file.
You will use the data source most of the time when you want to find a specific item of some collection, for example a specifically named image or the first object in your file. This is different then what you will use context for.
The context section is where you find data that is relevant for a specific point in time. You can for example get the current active object here or the active scene. This means that when you use this data in Serpens, you will always use the active object. If instead you want to use an object by name go to the data section instead.
The context section is also different because it changes depending on the area you are in. An area is something like the 3D Viewport or the Node Editor. The node editor has an active node tree while the 3D view doesn’t. Therefore the context will be different in each. A lot of items exist in all contexts (like the active object), but there are exceptions.
For these you can copy a context from any area. Simply right click an input field or a button in that area and click the copy context button. This will reload the data in the browser to the data from the context you copied.
App contains a few properties relating to your blender install. You can find things like the current blender version here.
In the filter on the left side of the browser you can filter the data types that are displayed. You can also search for a specific name.
<aside> ❗ Note that using the filters on the left side of the browser will not filter down the items that are not expanded. It only filters the top level of displayed elements. This is due to blender having a very large amount of data. We might implement workarounds for this at a later point but in the current state this would simply crash blender. You can use the filter buttons on the individual items to filter the elements inside it. Again, this will only filter that level of items.
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