Thoughts on Documentation

Agreed, I think most of us are php. Mysql. Website and dashboards.
When people ask about aspx or something I see many of us go quiet, as with mobile and ftp issues. Lol.

We are updating the docs, and i will be adding more mobile tutorials soon.
I want to cover all the basics for web apps first - for example people are still asking for things like multi upload etc. :slight_smile: but i am slowly updating them.

Well if you need help getting the web ones done Teodor just ask, I could do a multi upload doc if you wanted and probably a few other website ones, as far as the mobile ones go though I would be little use on that I’m afraid.

Hi Paul,
I was not referring to some specific tutorial i need help with :slight_smile:
It’s just that some things that seem obvious to me, i mean - following the logic in Wappler, even without docs i would have thought they are easy to figure out, are not so obvious for some of the users (i am in no way saying that this is bad/wrong!).

I will try to update the docs next few weeks so that they cover most of every new user’s questions :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I’m not asking for anything but wanted to give you a newcomer’s perspective. I know the documentation takes time and it is really hard to get right and keep current so just mentioning this in case it is not something you pros think about (just trying to help with my questions)

Yesterday Teodor showed me what validate could do - up until then I had noticed it (just like a lot of other stuff) but did not understand how or why to use it. I don’t think a lot of the options are documented (at least not the last time I read it). It would be very very helpful if all of the options just had some info available. Just an explanation of what they do / can do, would really help.

Another thing is (see below) sometimes I don’t see the {>} symbol and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be inserting (or what it would do). Is that just something that is unfinished in Wappler or just something that everyone but me knows about?

Anyway no need to spend time explaining it just wanted to let folks know how much I still don’t know :smiley:

2018-12-14_09-04-40

Norm, static events are for running custom js code :slight_smile: that’s why there is no dynamic data picker. You just call your js code/function there.
Example:
alert('i like pizza')

1 Like

Thanks - that makes sense :smiley:

alert('i love pizza')

haha, haha, I think we have all felt like that from time to time Norm, lol, tanks for the laugh.

Adding to your point of not knowing what those icons mean, I also don’t know what Modifiers and Debounce mean.
I found this few days old tutorial showing a use case for Modifiers and explaining that Debounce is delay.
I still don’t know what many components and server action options mean. And if I can’t find it here, it probably won’t show up on Google either.

Some times, I find that searching for things on DMXzone helps. And for other times, I just trouble @George and @Teodor with private messages. :sweat_smile:

1 Like

Sorry guys, we are doing our best with the docs. I hope to get everything documented really soon.

1 Like

Thanks - that makes me feel a little better - I have so much respect for the folks that know all this stuff…

Ditto. I sometimes feel I am wasting Team’s time with my basic questions when they can be spending their time working on making Wappler better.

But, documentation is SO SO difficult, yet important. You always miss out something and not everything can be explained in one example.
When the docs are more detailed, i’m sure more people will easily switch to Wappler.

No need to apologise @Teodor, the documentation has grown massive in a very short amount of time, considering you are trying to document everything from the entire Bootstrap 4 framework website, and w3schools, and javascript, and jquery, and font awesome, and php, and so many more. As a single person I think you are doing an awesome job, just wish i was more capable to try assist more.

4 Likes

Just a quick note on ‘debounce’. It can be very helpful to performance. Eg if you have a search field which searches on ‘updated’, a query will be sent for every keystroke. So if you search for ‘something’, 9 queries will be executed - however fast you type. If you set debounce to 500 for example, and type at a normal speed, then only one query will be executed.

4 Likes

Yes, debounce value is in milliseconds so everything above 300 should be working fine for normal typing :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hey there! I’ve been thinking a lot about documentation for Wappler recently so I thought I’d continue this thread and perhaps get some input from @Teodor as well.

I’ve been using Wappler for several months now, and I’m loving the concept. I have some modest background in frontend (meaning I can find what I’m looking for on StackOverflow when it comes to CSS/JS/JQuery :sweat_smile:) so Wappler’s tutorials on how to work with DBs and how to pass data from frontend to backend were great since they allowed me to get to the result quickly while learning some of the fundamentals.

Now, however, I’ve gotten to the point of basic understanding how Wappler’s underlying framework functions, and what I find lacking is a list of all of its availabilities, so to speak. If I go to JQuery’s site, I can read a short description of methods and their correct syntax. I can see that Wappler’s App Connect has a similar structured syntax and predefined methods, but now, I can only discover all of this through clicking on the visual interface - which is fine until I start making my own elements that don’t appear on Wappler’s visual interface.

For example, I was reading about passing data from App Connect to JS. I managed to get a JS array into Wappler to create a repeat out of it. However, naturally, I don’t see it as an array on the user interface side so I’m not given all the options of what I can do with this. (As a sidenote, it appears that selecting different elements on this kind of array uses different syntax from Wappler’s regular array elements - array.0 instead of array.items[0], for example.)

I know this will be more beneficial for technically more experienced people but I would love to see a basic list of everything Wappler’s App Connect can do with some short descriptions so that documentation would be more about the framework and not just the specific use cases (which are still very useful, as I said).

Teo, do you have anything like this available that I’ve missed - or plans to release it at some point? Мерси много. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

What I’d absolutely love to see is a wiki containing absolutely everything Wappler can do in maximum detail. This doesn’t need to appear overnight - maybe a structure could be created and we could all help build the finished result. Then, as things change, it could be updated, too.

I feel I know Wappler pretty well, now, but I still have questions when entering something into a box like ‘should I put quote around it?’ or ‘should the path have a trailing /?’ or more fundamental things which just aren’t immediately clear.

If every feature had a paragraph talking about it, explaining what it does, how it works, what needs to be entered into what box, etc. then it would make the whole thing sooooo much better.

I’d be happy to be part of a team that builds all this info. If there’s anything I’m not sure of then I won’t put it in. But I’m sure there’s plenty I could help with. And the Wappler team can keep an eye on it all and correct things as they appear.

So a Wappler community-driven wiki would get my vote.

3 Likes

I’m sure it’s all a just a commercial situation. Hopefully one day as Wappler grows and expands they can have someone dedicated to re-writing and adding to all the documentation.

1 Like

@Philip_J Agreed. I know what being part of a small team is like, and product dev definitely takes precedence over documentation. :slight_smile:

However, here’s an idea - throw in a discount to those in the Wappler community who write up the docs? I’m sure a lot of you with more experience could already fill in the majority of the gaps. Wappler’s team would need to provide the structure and QC, and the rest could be crowdsourced.

2 Likes

That’s kind of what I had in mind. I’m sure a lot of us could write good docs about its use. The key thing is the system itself, it needs to be easy to update otherwise I know I would just keep putting it on my to-do list and not actually get round to it.

1 Like