TouchDesigner | Make a Copy of that Table

When working with DATs there are often a whole host of operations that we want to be able to take advantage of that don’t make sense when we initially look at the documentation on the TouchDesigner Wiki. One simple example of this is how copy operations work. A clear example of this might be how copy operations work. For example, I have a table full of information but I’d like to make a copy of it for another part of my network. If we look at the Table DAT Class wiki page we see this:

copy(DAT)

Copy the text or table from the specified DAT operator.

OP – The DAT operator whose contents should be copied into the DAT.

How can we make sense of this?

Let’s start by first setting up a simple table – you can fill it with any information that you’d like. We also want an empty Table DAT, as well as a Text DAT.

In our Text DAT we’re going to write the following script:

source = op('table1')
target = op('table2')

target.copy(source)

Looking at the syntax of the operation we can see what we first defined two variables – target and source, named as such to make it easier to see what’s happening. Next we start with the target and then specify what operator we’d like to copy. Now we can right click on the text DAT, run our script, and voila. A little copy magic.