Comments on: Find out a method’s signature on the Firebug console

By: mccain

mccain — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:36:43 +0000

the idea about using the API on the console (currently only Firebug) is circling in my head now for a while and I turn it forth and back and I got this idea.
Couldn’t we write a mixin, that one could mix in to the entire dojo-namespace, which allows to write something like:
dojo.forEach.help()
so that we are actually builind something like the toString() just really helpful.
Why?
Because this way teh autocompletion of the method stays intact, whereas dojo.help(”dojo.forEach”) would not allow to use the auto completion. That is actually the main reason why I cam eup with it.
Thinking…

By: rcoup

rcoup — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:00:08 +0000

@pottedmeat

We’re using markdown for API docs, and it’s pretty readable in plain text. If a Firebug extension happened it could want it as a HTML snippet. Could alternatively do it as a Sidebar page in FF – might be more readable.

By: pottedmeat

pottedmeat — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:49:34 +0000

@rcoup and @mccain

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

@rcoup I’ll try to set something like this up. The question is how to display it, whether to just have it return a string, or pop up a dialog of some sort.

@mccain It would likely be more expensive to parse the current page than to just hit our API RPC. dojo.version should allow us to grab the most up-to-date documentation for that version.

By: mccain

mccain — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:03:31 +0000

That is a really good idea, dojo.help()! Great thing, some extension in firebug may later wrap it and provide the help via tooltips or alikes! Cool idea.
May be it could try to get the api docs first using the current page (so you get exactly the version you are using) and fallback to online getting it form dojotoolkit … appealing idea!

By: rcoup

rcoup — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 06:36:09 +0000

hmmm, wonder if we could look up the API reference magically? Firebug does support extensions, or we could do something like python: dojo.help(dojox.foo.bar)…

By: pottedmeat

pottedmeat — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:37:35 +0000

Unfortunately, this won’t work with every Dojo function. If using this technique results in some code that looks nothing like what you expected, you’ll have to instead consult the API or source code (it was likely created using dojo.declare)