The Dataflow.Blueprint layer provides generic components that can hold the "big picture" of a dataflow network. This is particularly useful for those dataflow frameworks such as Dataflow.Signals where the dataflow network is stored in the individual components - i.e., there is no global picture of the network available.

A blueprint component corresponds to an actual component - but whereas the actual component takes care of the work, the blueprint component provides a run-time polymorphic interface and can be embedded in a BGL graph. A dataflow network blueprint uses such a graph to hold the blueprint components and the connectivity information. In addition, blueprint components provide run-time port reflection. In the future, the bluprint layer will be expanded to support serialization and other features. More details are in the future work section.

The Dataflow.Blueprint layer is built on top of the Dataflow library concepts. Hence, it can be used with any dataflow framework for which a Dataflow support layer has been implemented.