# Objective
In my own project I was encountering the issue to find out which
entities were spawned after applying commands. I began maintaining a
vector of all entities with generational information before and after
applying the command and diffing it. This was awfully complicated though
and has no constant complexity but grows with the number of entities.
## Solution
Looking at `EntyMeta` it seemed obvious to me that struct can track the
tick just as it does with `MaybeLocation`, updated from the same call.
After that it became almost a given to also introduce query data
`SpawnDetails` which offers methods to get the spawn tick and location,
and query filter `Spawned` that filters entities out that were not
spawned since the last run.
## Testing
I expanded a few tests and added new ones, though maybe I forgot a group
of tests that should be extended too. I basically searched `bevy_ecs`
for mentions of `Changed` and `Added` to see where the tests and docs
are.
Benchmarks of spawn/despawn can be found
[here](https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/19047#issuecomment-2852181374).
---
## Showcase
From the added docs, systems with equal complexity since the filter is
not archetypal:
```rs
fn system1(q: Query<Entity, Spawned>) {
for entity in &q { /* entity spawned */ }
}
fn system2(query: Query<(Entity, SpawnDetails)>) {
for (entity, spawned) in &query {
if spawned.is_spawned() { /* entity spawned */ }
}
}
```
`SpawnedDetails` has a few more methods:
```rs
fn print_spawn_details(query: Query<(Entity, SpawnDetails)>) {
for (entity, spawn_details) in &query {
if spawn_details.is_spawned() {
print!("new ");
}
println!(
"entity {:?} spawned at {:?} by {:?}",
entity,
spawn_details.spawned_at(),
spawn_details.spawned_by()
);
}
}
```
## Changes
No public api was changed, I only added to it. That is why I added no
migration guide.
- query data `SpawnDetails`
- query filter `Spawned`
- method `Entities::entity_get_spawned_or_despawned_at`
- method `EntityRef::spawned_at`
- method `EntityMut::spawned_at`
- method `EntityWorldMut::spawned_at`
- method `UnsafeEntityCell::spawned_at`
- method `FilteredEntityRef::spawned_at`
- method `FilteredEntityMut::spawned_at`
- method `EntityRefExcept::spawned_at`
- method `EntityMutExcept::spawned_at`
---------
Co-authored-by: Eagster <79881080+ElliottjPierce@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Alice Cecile <alice.i.cecile@gmail.com>
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