How do we create presets like in Max/MSP. Where we can save a state of something like a toggle or a number stored, etc.

In PD, how do we make a preset work? I want it to work especially for toggles. Does anyone know how to save a state of a toggle as X when patch is loaded? And save several states?

@otterly

if you right click or cntrl click on a toggle
and select Properties
you can click the button that says "No init" under Parameters
so it changes to Init
when you save the patch it should store its state. (*this also works for sliders radio buttons and the Number2 number atom Shift+Ctrl+N.)

you can also look in the Help Browser at 5.reference/savestate-help.pd

of course if you want to make sure it opens the same way every time regardless i would just use
[loadbang]
|
[1( or [0(

as far as more general state saving techniques there are many methods to do this.

If you want to be able to save and load several presets for one patch, arrays are the way to go. There are more than a dozen generic preset managing patches around this forum if you look in the patch and abstraction sections. But you will probably learn more from creating one yourself.

For a simple preset management use ; messages. Use the receive options on your buttons to your advantage. For example let's say you have four toggles receiving on b1, b2, b3, b4 respectively. Then you make a message box like this: [;
b1 1;
b2 0;
b3 0;
b4 1; (
The semicolons are important!. Now you that message will set all those toggles whenever you bang it, without connecting chords for the toggles.

If you're having a lot of toggles you might wanna look into ad-da conversion / binary to decimal and back. This way you can (theoretically) keep track of 32 zeros and ones with one float. There are a couple of conversion patches in the abastractions forum.

As for working with arrays for preset management, take a look at the help files, and the array examples in the /doc/ folder to get an idea what you can do with tabread and tabwrite.

Also check out the new [savestate] object in Vanilla 0.49 for working with abstractions!