Saving or cloning a VisualElement tree.

I am creating a large VisualElement of 100+ children in code. Ideally, I would like to save this to a VisualTreeAsset in the editor and use VisualTreeAsset to clone it when needed at runtime. I don't see how to create and save a VisualTreeAsset from a VisualElement. Alternatively, I could create it at runtime once, then clone it under other VisualElements but I don't see a simple way to that either.

Any suggestions?

 

This is what Uxml is for. Use UIBuilder and create it that way. It will give you a VisualTreeAsset/Uxml that you can clone at runtime as many times as you want.

You could in theory create a script that creates the Uxml for you from a VisualElement, but that's a lot of work that the UIBuilder is already doing for you.

 

The UIBuilder is a manual tool only isn't it, AFAIK it does not have an API, if it does that is what I would like to know about. I am specifically asking about how to do this in code because the workflow is to build this part of the UI from code not manually.