Indeed this does seem like a viable approach. One that stands in stark contrast to the current state of the art as exemplified by Door/Window Builder.
DWB is an amazing achievement but if anything has become overly complex. While it attempts to be modular and offers opportunities to save presets it is quite laborious to work through all the dialogs, many of which are confusing due to how much is crammed on to each pane. And in the end many simple North American window profiles remain difficult or impossible to properly represent, especially in section.
So the component based approach not only has the advantage of flexibility but leaves the prospect of creating or customizing a needed sub-assembly as a real possibility. As is stands now one would have to dig pretty deep into GDL to add something as simple as an apron, only to repeat the same modifications to multiple window objects used in a particular project. That or hope to convince the developers of these complex objects to that your need justifies adding yet another custom parameter.
One thing that would really make this fly for me is a graphic development toolkit. Even if some GDL tweaking were required down the road, it would be great to build that sash from parts rather than code, in an environment where you could designate which dimensions became parameters.
Interesting subject.
Regards,
Geoff Briggs
I & I Design, Seattle, USA
AC7-27, M1 Mac, OS 14.x