In essence, a container would be a group of completely standalone components and databases, basically mirroring the isolation of plugins. It would be especially useful for developing plugins. I personally don’t want to see all of my projects’ flows and components and databases while I’m working on a plugin, it kind of messes up my organization.
Containers would be bot-independent but would count towards flow count of any bot they’re installed on. A container could be installed on multiple bots at once (data in DBs would NOT be shared by default, but maybe once shared DBs are added it could be an option) or it could be installed on one bot but archived (taking up storage space and flow slots, but showing up under a special “Archive” collapsible tab under the normal container list).
Containers could also potentially be shared just like flow share links. Containers would appear under the components tab (they would kind of have their own little section after all the normal components).
Back to the main reason why containers would be useful: Flows and databases (and everything else) would act like it was on a completely separate bot. That means if I’m editing inside a container I don’t have the option to pick a database from another container or from the bot that the container is installed on. This also means that they would be great for plugin development: instead of selecting flows and databases manually, just pick a container and you’re done.
Hopefully this makes sense :)
Edit: just realized I didn’t say anything about how they would be created it edited lol
Basically they could show up in the bot picker under a collapsible menu or they could be selected from the component tab of a bot to edit an instance directly just like it was a bot (same ui but with only database and component tab and a settings tab to edit metadata and go to other instances. If selected from the bot picker it would essentially go to a similar page to the settings page but without the ability to edit database rows as those are tied to instances. An instance could therefore be selected to edit that instance’s data.
Hopefully that cleared it up lol