A Formular is basically a description a Message, in fact many of them can be created from a single Formular. It simply provides a basic set of named and typed Fields.
It comes in two flavors. The obvious one is in the Formular (Message). But don't be fooled, this one only allows you to define Formulars application wide. For prototyping, you can design a custom Formular to each relevant node! That's right, when you click yourself a pin layout in a layout window, you are actually defining an internal Formular for that very node.
Formular is still quite spartan. No fancy metadata like min/max or precise default management provided yet. However, it allows a very blunt form of inheritance by simply flattening out all parent Formulars and prior checking for conflicts.
Declarations of Fields happen a lot with Message, because it defines the internal structure of the message. It is the same with boththe window panel for Nodes set to Formuular "None", and with the Formular (Message) inputs.
Think of Message as a collection Fields, which is basically a named (and binsizeable) Spread of any of the various Types following:
- bool, int
- float, double
- string
- Vector2d, * Vector3d, * Vector4d
- Transform
- Color - with alpha
- Raw - a.k.a. Stream
- Time - from tmp's Time
- Message - yes, it is nested and opens the door for recursion
Use any one of those Type aliases as you would in c#, something like
string MyFirstWord
First declare the Fields Type, then declare its name. For names, CamelCase is usually a good choice. A declaration like above will yield a Field of Type string with a single value.
Time[10] MyTenFirstDates
This, on the contrary will yield structure for a list of 10 localized timestamps. This helps when using the ubiquitous Create (Message), Edit (Message) and Split (Message), because their pins will not only have the Field's name, but also a preset bin size. Leave the array index empty, if you you don't know the number of items in the Field yet, just like this:
Color[] FavoriteColors