I may not be thinking this through correctly, but how do you handle broken connections with inlets/outlets in the cleared subpatch? I.e., the containing patch will lose its patch connections to the inlets/outlets of the subpatch if the sbupatch is cleared.
Phil
With certain clean patching habits it's not that bad. For example the original nqpoly4 was rather messy because it did the dynamic patching in the abstraction itself, used namcanvas for it and thus relied on a certain initial state.
What I changed was to remove namcanvas, do the dynamic patching inside of a subpatch and started with clearing that patch from a loadbang.
A loadbanged [; pd-subpatch clear( IMO is mandatory for dynamic patching in abstractions. Even if it's saved with old content that will be removed on the next load.
Another use for dynamic patching is automatically creating parts of static patches. For example my piece "Frost" on the GOSUB10 netlabel release uses 60 resonant bandpass filters driven by noise bursts. Of course I didn't patch all of these manually and changed their arguments, instead I used dynamic patching to generate the filter bank once, which then was saved into a static patch.
In that use case, one should not use a loadbang'd clear of course. ;)
To add another example: I use dynamic patching in the list-abs-intro.pd patch to generate a list of all list-abs in the [list]-abs collection.
Ciao