# Objective
- Allow queuing insertion of dynamic components to an existing entity
## Solution
- Add `insert_by_id<T: Send + 'static>(commands: &mut EntityCommands,
component_id: ComponentId, value: T)` and the `try_insert_by_id`
counterpart
## Testing
TODO
- Did you test these changes? If so, how?
- Are there any parts that need more testing?
- How can other people (reviewers) test your changes? Is there anything
specific they need to know?
- If relevant, what platforms did you test these changes on, and are
there any important ones you can't test?
## Alternatives
This PR is not feature-complete for dynamic components. In particular,
it
- only supports one component
- only supports adding components with a known, sized type
These were not implemented because doing so would require enhancing
`CommandQueue` to support pushing unsized commands (or equivalently,
pushing commands with a buffer of data). Even so, the cost would not be
transparent compared to the implementation in this PR, which simply
captures the `ComponentId` and `value: T` into the command closure and
can be easily memcpy'ed to the stack during execution. For example, to
efficiently pass `&[ComponentId]` from the caller to the world, we would
need to:
1. Update `CommandQueue.bytes` from `Vec<MaybeUninit<u8>>` to
`Vec<MaybeUninit<usize>>` so that it has the same alignment as
`ComponentId` (which probably needs to be made `#[repr(transparent)]`
too)
2. After pushing the Command metadata, push padding bytes until the vec
len is a multiple of `size_of::<usize>()`
3. Store `components.len()` in the data
4. memcpy the user-provided `&[ComponentId]` to `CommandQueue.bytes`
5. During execution, round up the data pointer behind the `Command` to
skip padding, then cast the pointer and consume it as a `&[ComponentId]`
The effort here seems unnecessarily high, unless someone else has such a
requirement. At least for the use case I am working with, I only need a
single known type, and if we need multiple components, we could always
enhance this function to accept a `[ComponentId; N]`.
I recommend enhancing the `Bundle` API in the long term to achieve this
goal more elegantly.
---------
Co-authored-by: Alice Cecile <alice.i.cecile@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Felix Rath <felixm.rath@gmail.com>
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