Feature Request: Artists should have a name attribute?

[JamesRamm]

It would be great if plotting methods accepted a name argument which would set a name attribute in the relevant artists. This would make GUI development with embedded matplotlib plots much easier.

In interactive applications we may create any number of plots within an axes - keeping track of them can be a problem. The label attribute is no good as this is used by legends, so needs to support 'nolegend' labels...

A name attribute would provide a mechanism by which to display a reference to a plot/data to the user and allow an artist object to be retrieved via its name.

A potential problem would be having artists of the same name. A solution could be to enforce unique names for each artist within an axes, or unique names for each artist type within an axes...
I think the second method would be preferred as this would allow different artist types to be grouped under the same name. There are many times where I encounter a situation where I plot some data (as e.g. Line2D) and plot related data (such as the standard deviation...as e.g. a polycollection via fill_between), but would like to treat these as one, or related objects for operations such as removing a plot from the axes.

[tacaswell]

There is the gid on artists already which I think can be used as you want.

[tacaswell]

Closing this as the gid attribute will solve the minimal version of the name problem.

One of the long-running design discussions is to re-factor the whole artist tree into a DOM-style structure which you can then walk. I think this would provide a way to logically group a collection of artists into a bucket which would let you bulk apply operations to all of the artists in the bucket.