Waypoints position and rotation are empty from the scene api

[Aadjou]

Bug report from SO

How to reproduce

• io3d.scene.getAframeElements api returns the waypoints with position and rotation empty.

Expected result

• The position and rotation are imported correctly.

Actual result

• The position and rotation are empty. <a-entity tour-waypoint="TOP VIEW" io3d-uuid="2c0c947b-5135-456d-9626-8c80778b9dd5" position="" rotation="" scale="" visible=""></a-entity>

[AVGP]

Just chiming in here, because this coincides with an observation I made. There's definitely an improvement in here, because I think that looking at the DOM should always reflect the truth* and in this case it doesn't.

However, what I wanted to make y'all aware of is: The DOM itself only supports strings in attributes, i.e. setAttribute('position', '1 2 3') is good, but setAttribute('position', {x: 1, y: 2, z: 3}) is invalid in vanilla DOM. In A-Frame this is fine, tho, because they overwrite setAttribute and getAttribute accordingly. For performance reasons this isn't necessarily reflected back to the DOM in string form (as that conversion costs computation cycles), but it should work.

I think getAframeElements uses the object form when setting the attributes, which I think we might wanna change to the string form, because:

• if someone uses it without having A-Frame ready yet (e.g. because they prepopulate the HTML via 3d.io) they'll run into problems
• if someone uses it to generate code to copy&paste for users, they won't get the attributes visible and thus copy incorrect code
• I guess (correct me if I'm wrong) people will call this relatively sparsely (i.e. not in something like requestAnimationFrame) and the hit of creating the strings isn't a problem

I'm happy to take this issue up, @frederic-schwarz, if you wish me to :)

[frederic-schwarz]

to-aframe-elements.js currently uses strings for setting attributes like here https://github.com/archilogic-com/3dio-js/blob/master/src/scene/structure/to-aframe-elements.js#L292 or here https://github.com/archilogic-com/3dio-js/blob/master/src/scene/structure/to-aframe-elements.js#L175

[AVGP]

So it turns out that the data gets returned just fine:

  document.querySelector('[tour-waypoint]').getAttribute('position') // returns {x: 1, y: 2, z: 3} etc.

You can observe this behaviour in this glitch.

However, we assume you'd want to use the HTML in some way, e.g. use innerHTML to send this to a server. In that case, you need to call element.flushToDom() before, as documented here.

Here is code demonstrating this. When you look at the code you get after clicking the button, you'll see that the elements where flushToDOM was used show up correctly in the text, but the box that was dynamically created (and is a built-in A-Frame element!) does not.