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I'd like to be able to open and close patchers from a "master" patcher. I know how to do this if I'm embedding a patcher into a bpatcher but I'm just talking about opening arbitrary patchers.

I see I can use the 'load' into a pcontrol to open a patcher but I don't see any way to close it other than by making sure that every patcher I want to open has its own [thispatcher] with a [receive] through which I can send a 'dispose' message. This means I can only use it for patchers I've created myself.

Further, the description of 'dispose' has ominous messages about it being evil with no explanation as to what that means.

Any way to do this, possibly with externals?

opening-and-closing-arbitrary-patchers-programatically

Wclose (also via thispatcher) , will close a window and consequently close that file if it is a patcher. Dispose *will* dispose of a subpatch (as in delete it from the patch) and similarly close a patcher file - but not actually remove it from the file system or destroy it. In any case as you point out, they do require this patcher to be present. You might also consider the max messages openfile and close file, but afaik these commands are limited to opening/closing files in a sequential manner in other word opening one file, then another and then attempting to closet the first may not work. Beyond that you are probably looking at applescript via the shell object...

Wclose (also via thispatcher) , will close a window and consequently close that file if it is a patcher. Dispose *will* dispose of a subpatch (as in delete it from the patch) and similarly close a patcher file - but not actually remove it from the file system or destroy it. In any case as you point out, they do require this patcher to be present.  You might also consider the max messages openfile  and close file, but afaik these commands are limited to opening/closing files in a sequential manner in other word opening one file, then another and then attempting to closet the first may not work. Beyond that you are probably looking at applescript via the shell object...


ok --- wclose does what I need, I guess, subject to the limitation that every patcher has to contain a "receiver".

I had tried the max messages openfile/close but they were not useful for precisely the reason you mention.

you could try to load a patcher into a poly~ or into a bpatcher...

pcontrol is what I use to open another patcher. It's closing that other patcher that's the issue (if the patcher being opened doesn't already have some stuff in it so it can respond to remote commands)

oh, you answered, before I corrected my post...;-)

Yeah, downside of sitting in front of computer all the time, get to respond immediately. Nevertheless, I appreciate your taking the time to respond.

I know how to do it using a bpatcher but that really only defers the issue as I want to be able to open a varying number of patchers and then later close them.

Opening and closing arbitrary patchers programatically