Developer notes field in Triggers and Actions

Lots of cool and sophisticated stuff in the community wish list but this one is simple and really practical.

I find myself spending LOTS of time trying to reverse engineer my thought process for a given action in older XPs or, similarly, explaining to a collaborating colleague how an action or trigger fits into an XP. To remedy that, I would really love to see a “notes” field added to the bottom of the triggers and actions window where a dev can detail the purpose of any given trigger or action.

Some of these triggers fire other triggers and actions and when they chain together it can get really hard to follow. A properly annotated notes field would make figuring out complex triggers and actions a simple process. Since it wouldn’t affect the functionality of the XP, I gotta believe this would be an easy to add but very useful addition.

Surely Intuiface’s own internal devs see the value in documenting their own code, right?

Thoughts?

3 Likes

I fully concur with that!

So far, I’m carefully naming my Assets, it helps a bit and when really necessary, I even let myself some Text Asset outside of the scene with personal notes inside :grimacing:

I miss sometimes having notes too. Like @alex suggested, naming the assets in a very self explanatory way is a bit time consuming, but it pays off when you deal with many objects. I’m also careful in sorting actions by time, so they are sequentially correct. Sometimes, I also ‘spell out’ actions because they are easier to read, as opposed as combining them in single operations.

Notes would be especially useful when you use bindings and add converters. It’s so easy to overlook them and maybe delete them by mistake.

I really love the idea and yeah, it would be help full, as more people are editing the XP’s and therefore it would help other team members in finding how or why the steps they took made it happen, or influence another part of the XP.

Thanks, fellas, for chiming in! I try to do all those things as well: Smart naming, sequential ordering, even notes on the side – but all of those things are most efficient once the dev has a working knowledge of the XP.

Even with all that, once you spend some time away from an XP or if you are introducing it to a dev with no prior time in it, there is a certain period of (re)familiarizing the asset names and look for text notes that may (or may not) be scattered in or around the XP.

With larger XPs, sometimes parsing the triggers and actions window is analogous to standing in a room with a complex domino setup and trying to figure out how it all will fall while looking at it with one eye thru a paper towel tube. :astonished: :grimacing: