Flowing

Hey!
Don't flow effects for one unit into a frame for a different unit. You'll get errors. This won't get fixed since the "problem" lies at a very fundamental level in the addon code.

What is Flowing?
Flowing lets you move effects from one frame to another, like a filter might. The difference between flowing and a filter is that when you flow effects from one frame to another, the effects flowing in are not sorted with the effects already in the frame. The most common example of flowing is to make your buffs and debuffs appear in the same frame. You don't want your debuffs to be mixed in with the buffs, which is what would happen if you used a filter to move your debuffs into the same frame as your buffs.

Here are debuffs sent to frame 1 alongside buffs using a filter (in this case, 1:h)

Not quite what we wanted. Instead, we configure frame 2 to be a child of frame 1 like this:

And now we see that the debuffs from frame 2 flow into frame 1, looking the way we wanted them to:

Note that in these images frame 1 is set to start from the bottom, which is why you see buffs below debuffs. The debuffs are indeed flowing into frame 1 "below" the buffs.

Another common setup is to push temporary weapon enchants into their own frame flow them back into frame 1, followed by the debuffs from frame 2. In this way, you make a stack like this:

Buff1
Buff2
Buff3
...
BuffN
WeaponEnchant1
WeaponEnchant2
Debuff1
Debuff2
Debuff3
...
DebuffN

To do that:

• Create a new frame (say it's frame 3)
• Create filter 3:e (weapon enchants to frame 3)
• Make frame 3 and 2 children of frame 1 with the order in the list as Frame 3 then Frame 2

Note that the order that the children appear in the list is important. Effects from the first child frame in the list will be placed into the flow parent frame, then from the second child frame, etc. From the example above, you want to make sure that frame 3 is the first child, and frame 2 the second:

When effects are flowed into a new frame, they will be be formatted (icon/bar/name/timer) as the flow parent frame is defined. Effects that are flowed into a new frame retain the expiry settings of their original frame (an option to make them use the flow parent frame's settings will be coming.)

If you don't have enough space in the flow parent to show all of the effects that want to flow into it, any extras will stay in their normal frame (which you can set to visibility never if it offends the feng shui of your UI layout). With that, say you set:

• frame 1 to hold 20 effects
• frame 2 to hold 10
• frame 3 to hold 2

• If you have 10 buffs, 2 weapon enchants, and 5 debuffs - everything will appear in frame 1 just fine
• If you have 15 buffs, 2 weapon enchants, and 10 debuffs - only 3 debuffs will appear in frame 1, and 7 will spill into frame 2
• if you have 12 buffs, 0 weapon enchants, and 11 debuffs - 8 debuffs will go into frame 1 and 3 debuffs will show in frame 2

You can set the number of effects in a frame to whatever you want, so you can flow a bunch together and not usually have overflow. Using extra frames, filters/show in frame and flowing, you can get really fancy with flow children to have "strata" of buffs and debuffs in a single frame. Remember that flowing takes precedence over filters. Whatever you set to flow into a frame will appear, regardless of what filtering you have applied.