Online documentation scenario & suggestions

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Matthew Diamond posted over 9 years ago

I see in another post that you are working to improve your documentation. I've been wrestling with the igGrid online documentation myself, and I thought it might be useful to you to see the kinds of problems I was having.

Background: I was looking for a way to detect whether the user had any unsaved changes in the igGrid.

Even though I knew roughly what I was looking for, the pendingTransactions method was almost impossible to find:

I searched for keywords like "unsaved", "pending", "changes", "edits", "updates", "transactions", didn't find anything. First of all, it's under igGrid, not iggridUpdating where I did most of my searches. Secondly, it's a Method, not an Option. In other words, to find things I have to search on multiple pages, click the Expand button, then try a bunch of keywords.
Then I spent time on the wrong approach (dataDirty) because it was the only thing I found that seemed to fit. I posted in the forum, and a tech explained why it wasn't going to do what I wanted.
I don't remember exactly how I then came across pendingTransactions, but clearly some luck was involved. :-)
Even now that I know the name "pendingTransactions" I had trouble finding it again the next day. I had tried to save a link to it by right-clicking on it but that doesn't work (I see how to do it now.) So I had to search all the pages again.
Googling "iggrid pendingTransactions" fails to return any documentation links I can actually navigate to. It does show some forum posts. The sample code it finds is all for ASP.NET though.

Any of the following would help:

Make the documentation work better with Google and other web searches, so they return usable links
Have a documentation search function built in to your website
Have an index page for all igGrid symbols
Have a downloadable PDF of the entire documentation I could search.
It would be nice if I could right-click on a link in the documentation and get the URL, instead of the # hack.

igGrid's sample code has been very useful, and your support is top-notch. I feel the documentation is the weak spot, for the reasons I state above.

Hope this helps,

Matt

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Matthew Diamond posted over 9 years ago in reply to Ambrose Little

My pleasure. I don't know if my experiences are typical or not, but I am grateful that you have given them a look. I hope they help.

FYI regarding the CHM files: I am able to open them without difficulty on the Mac, using a free reader such as iCHM or "Read CHM". Unfortunately I tried 3 readers and the search functions all have the same problem as Google did: they flag the igGrid page when I search for "transactions" but always take me to the Overview tab, not to where the word appears. (And wouldn't you know, the Windows search function does exactly the same thing. I probably should have tried that first. :-) So, having an offline copy will be useful but it doesn't solve the searching issue I mentioned before.

Thanks again!
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Ambrose Little posted over 9 years ago in reply to Matthew Diamond

Hi Matthew,

This is all very useful and mostly intersects where we see areas to improve as well. We will be using this thread as inputs for improvements, and we may reach out for more clarifications as we are working on it.

Thanks again!
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Offline Martin Pavlov posted over 9 years ago in reply to Matthew Diamond

Hello Matthew,

Thanks for the explanation.

There is no way to download the CHM file rather than the Platform Installer. The non-windows archive includes only the product and the samples.

We will consider changing that as well.

Best regards,
Martin Pavlov
Infragistics, Inc.
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Matthew Diamond posted over 9 years ago in reply to Martin Pavlov

Thanks!

Just FYI: I am doing most of my work outside of Windows, though I do have a VM I can fire up. So I will be able to use the offline documentation, but a platform-agnostic format would be more useful to me.

(Although, a quick web search suggests there is are ways to read CHM on both Macs & Linux, so i may give that a try. Assuming it works you might consider making the CHM file available for download without a Windows installer.)

Thanks again,

Matt
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Offline Martin Pavlov posted over 9 years ago in reply to Matthew Diamond

Hello Matthew,

Matthew Diamond said:
Speaking of documentation: another post here suggested that grid API docs could be downloaded, but I haven't found them. Can someone tell me where to look?

You can install the offline API documentation in CHM format from the Infragistics Platform Installer Tool which can be downloaded from the following Url: https://ko.infragistics.com/support. In the "Platform Installer" section click on the "Online Installer", then run the tool and select the "Ignite UI". After that click on the "Help" on the right.

I'm also attaching a screenshot with the steps.

Hope this helps,
Martin Pavlov
Infragistics, Inc.
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