Working with Collections

In addition to being able to program VisualBots objects individually, you can more easily and efficiently manipulate them as collections of objects. The following four object collections are available:

The Bots collection object holds a reference to all existing Bot objects. The collection object shares many of the properties and methods of an individual Bot object, plus functionality to create Bot objects, extract population information, and create user-defined Tag properties. You create a new Bot object using the Create method and remove a Bot from the collection using the Destroy method. Individual Bot objects are accessed using the Item method.

The Cells collection object holds a reference to all existing Cell objects. The collection object shares many of the properties and methods of an individual Cell object, plus functionality to redimension the Cells grid, extract population information, and create user-defined Tag properties. You redimension the Cells grid using the SetGrid method. Individual Cell objects are accessed using the Item method.

The Group collection object is a subset of the Bots collection. The collection object shares many of the properties and methods of an individual Bot object, plus functionality to extract population information and to facilitate group to group manipulation (for example set intersection and union). A Group object can be created in several different ways. For example, the GroupNear method returns a Group object consisting of nearby Bot objects. Bot objects can be added or subtracted from a Group. You add a Bot object to a Group using the Add method and remove a Bot using the Remove method. Individual Bot objects are accessed using the Item method.

The Region collection object is a subset of the Cells collection. The collection object shares many of the properties and methods of an individual Cell object, plus functionality to extract population information and to facilitate group to group manipulation (for example intersection, union, etc.). A Region object can be created in several different ways. For example, the Adjacent4 method returns a Region object consisting of the four adjacent Cell objects. Cell objects can be added or subtracted using the Add and Remove methods. Individual Cell objects are accessed using the Item method.

The Tags collection object is a collection of user-defined properties called Tag objects. You add a Tag object to the Tags collection using the Add method and remove a Tag using the Remove method. Individual Tag objects are accessed using the Item method.

Group and Region objects have methods to manage member object order within each collection. For example, the Shuffle method randomly rearranges the order of objects, the RandomSelect method randomly selects and returns an object, Insert inserts an object before a specified position, the Swap method interchanges the position of two member objects, and the ShiftIndex method shifts the position of all member objects.

Groups and Regions objects have methods to perform set arithmetic such as Union, Intersect, and Subtract. Information functions such as IsMember, IsNullSet, and IsSubset can be used to compare and analyze the contents of collections.