Data_select

Data_basic unpacks a context bus into every field at once - eight or nine output sockets whether you need them or not. Most of the time you don't need all of them; you need the vae, or just the current latent, and nothing else. Data_select is the lighter tool for that: pick exactly one field from a dropdown and get it back as a single output, no clutter.

How it works

Wire in a context, choose which field you want from the type dropdown, and the node hands back that one value on its data output. That's the entire mechanism - it's essentially a lookup into the bus by name. The dropdown covers a lot of ground: the schema lists 29 choices in total, including the obvious ones (model, clip, positive, negative, vae, latent, images, mask) plus the pack's multi-clip slots (clip1 through clip4, for loader configurations like SD3.5 or Hi-Dream that need more than one clip encoder) and over a dozen more beyond that.

One thing worth knowing before you rely on this: the data output is typed as a wildcard (*). ComfyUI won't stop you from picking "vae" in the dropdown and then wiring the output into a socket that expects a MODEL - the type system here trusts you to pick correctly, it doesn't enforce it at the graph level the way a properly-typed VAE output would.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• context (required, RUN_CONTEXT) - the bus you're pulling from.
• type (optional, enum) - which field to extract. The listed sample includes model, clip, positive, negative, vae, latent, images, mask, clip1–clip4, and "…+17 more" beyond that - open the dropdown in ComfyUI to see the full set live, since the exact remaining options aren't enumerated here.
• data (output, wildcard) - the single value you picked.

How to install it

Bundled with the full pack. Via ComfyUI Manager: search "ComfyUI-Apt_Preset" → Install → restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/cardenluo/ComfyUI-Apt_Preset.git

Windows: run install.bat from the cloned folder through ComfyUI's embedded Python. Linux/Mac: activate your ComfyUI venv and install the requirements from that folder by hand. Restart ComfyUI. No extra dependencies beyond the base pack.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Downstream node rejects the output, or the connection looks "wrong" on the canvas. Because data is a wildcard type, ComfyUI can't warn you at connection time if you picked the wrong field - if a wire that should obviously work is failing at runtime, double-check the type dropdown actually matches what the destination node expects.

Output is empty or the wrong value entirely. Confirm the upstream context actually has that field set in the first place - Data_select only reads what's already in the bus, it can't produce a vae out of a context that never had one wired into it upstream.

Wondering if you should use this or Data_basic. If you need one or two fields off a context, Data_select keeps your graph tidier - one node, one dropdown, one output, versus a node with a wall of mostly-unused sockets. Reach for Data_basic instead when you need several fields at once, or when you also want to override values as they pass through rather than just read them.