Packing arbitrary data into the gdp

[Vormav]

Let's say you wanted to pack arbitrary data into a GU_Detail. Maybe structs, or whatever else.

I know, I know; bad idea and there's definitely a better way to be doing things. But just humor me here and pretend that it was a sane thing to do. How would you do it?

A detail attribute of type GB_ATTRIB_MIXED seems most obvious, except that it's not saved to .bgeo files, and whatever I use has to work with disk caches.

I could of course allocate as much space as I wanted on any other attribute type, like an int. What I don't like about this idea is that all of the visual cues in detail view are going to be wrong; let's say I've allocated 2kb for an integer attribute, but am using that data for something else: Detail view will interpet this as an array of 500 ints, and so present a ridiculous number of columns. It's obnoxious.

The last attribute solution seems to be to write a formatted representation of the data into a string attribute, which just means constantly dealing with the extra overhead of going to and from that string format; probably not horrendously expensive, but hardly ideal.

Are there any other options here that I'm overlooking?

[edward]

Not offhand. If you have 500 ints, then it will be obnoxious in the details view regardless of how you do it. I'd try to break it up into as many sensible attributes as possible, with some naming convention. It would be a lot more easier to handle in the details view that way I think.