Hi, I'm trying to clone a selected object, but it only seems to work on single paths, not on groups, rectangles, text etc.

Minimum working example:

iddd = self.svg.selection[0].get('id')
elem = inkex.Use(x="50mm",  y="50mm")
elem.set('xlink:href', '#'+iddd)
self.svg.append(elem)

If I manually edit the SVG I can point the a xlink:href to anything, e.g. text123 and it works fine. The extension creates the Use, I can view the attribs, but it just won't add to the document if it is not a path.

I found clones_in_perspective extension in the Mightyscape collection, which adds clones in a different way. I've stripped the code down to this, but it also does not work on anything that isn't a single path. But for some reason the extension itself works fine on text, shapes etc

xpath = list(self.svg.selected.items())[0][0]
sel = self.svg.selected[xpath]
id = sel.get('id')
parent = sel.getparent()
j = parent.index(sel)
att = {
              "id" : self.svg.get_unique_id("clone" + iddd),
              inkex.addNS('href','xlink') : "#" + iddd,
              inkex.addNS('x','inkscape') : str(50),
              inkex.addNS('y','inkscape') : str(50),
              'transform' : ("matrix(%f,0,0,%f,%f,%f)" % (1, 1,1, 1)),
              "width" :  "100%",
              "height" : "100%",
        }
parent.insert(j, etree.Element('use', att))       

I'm not sure if this is a bug, or something I'm missing. Inkscape 1.3

It should be as simple as this:

import inkex

from inkex import Use

def clone_element(self, element):

new_clone = Use()
new_clone.set('xlink:href', f'#{element.get_id()}')

self.svg.get_current_layer().append(new_clone)


class MakeClones(inkex.EffectExtension):

def add_arguments(self, pars):
pass

def effect(self):

selection_list = self.svg.selected

if len(selection_list) < 1:
return

for item in selection_list:
clone_element(self, item)

if __name__ == '__main__':
MakeClones().run()

Thanks for the reply, it helped me narrow down the issue. I was just making a stupid mistake in my code. I forgot to remove a inkex.abortextension that was being called if the selection wasn't a path further down....

inklinea

def clone_element(self, element): new_clone = Use() new_clone.set('xlink:href', f'#{element.get_id()}')

I think this can be simplified to:

def clone_element(self, element):
    new_clone = Use()
    new_clone.href = element

Old thread I know, but it comes up when searching for help with cloning objects.