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HomeHomeDevelopment and...Development and...DNN Platform (o...DNN Platform (o...Where's the full documentation for the API and methods?Where's the full documentation for the API and methods?
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2/9/2014 2:34 PM
 
Tony Henrich


Joined: 12/15/2008
Posts: 838
Chris Hammond wrote:
The way we've always done it, trial and error.

 

How does trial and error even work? You try something which you might think will work and if it doesn't work, you look for something else? Very inefficient and crude way to use an API.
 
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2/9/2014 3:31 PM
 
Richard Howells


Richard Howells's Avatar

www.dynamisys.co.uk
Joined: 3/26/2006
Posts: 2001
Sorry - I saw you joined six years ago w/ 400 plus posts. Assumed you had some experience.
Best wishes,
- Richard
Agile Development Consultant, Practitioner, and Trainer
www.dynamisys.co.uk
 
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2/10/2014 11:06 AM
 
cathal connolly


cathal connolly's Avatar

www.cathal.co.uk
Joined: 4/9/2003
Posts: 9676
We know the API documentation is incomplete, much of this comes from being an opensource project - OSS projects tend to have a history of developers only interested in writing interesting new features and not doing "boring" work like documentation. As DNN has existed for 6 years before the Corp theres a lot of legacy methods need documented (code contributed by the corp has a requirement for xml documentation so you'll notice those methods correctly documented usually). Ernst-Peter Tamminga and I (as part of the reference team) worked on this area a few years bak(the sandcastle scripts are from Ernst-Peter). At one point we published a blog with a suggested format of code commented and asked for contributions to help in this area. Sadly we had almost no contributions so the effort died out - I would love it if people would consider helping out now (with github it's a lot easier to take a contribution). BTW the wiki often has useful content as it allows for more space to contextualize API methods e.g. editurl is covered as part of module navigation @ http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/page/...
Buy the new Professional DNN7: Open Source .NET CMS Platform book Amazon US
 
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2/10/2014 2:12 PM
 
Tony Henrich


Joined: 12/15/2008
Posts: 838
cathal connolly wrote:
We know the API documentation is incomplete, much of this comes from being an opensource project - OSS projects tend to have a history of developers only interested in writing interesting new features and not doing "boring" work like documentation. As DNN has existed for 6 years before the Corp theres a lot of legacy methods need documented (code contributed by the corp has a requirement for xml documentation so you'll notice those methods correctly documented usually). Ernst-Peter Tamminga and I (as part of the reference team) worked on this area a few years bak(the sandcastle scripts are from Ernst-Peter). At one point we published a blog with a suggested format of code commented and asked for contributions to help in this area. Sadly we had almost no contributions so the effort died out - I would love it if people would consider helping out now (with github it's a lot easier to take a contribution). BTW the wiki often has useful content as it allows for more space to contextualize API methods e.g. editurl is covered as part of module navigation @ http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/page/...

 

I understand what you're saying. I am a developer and I know documentation is boring. However IT IS boring if you sit down in a long session and just write documentation. No one wants to do this.

BUT people are approaching this the wrong way. You write documentation in a piece meal way. When a developer looks at some code in DNN and sees a method that he's familiar with and has no description, he can jot down a quick description in a few seconds and then go back to what he was doing. This way it's not a boring task. It's quick. When enough developers do this over time, eventually the documentation gets more complete. It's distributed and efficient. I expected the developers in the corp to have done this, including legacy code. I am assuming they look at legacy code once a while.. right?

It's like the goal of reCaptcha project. No volunteer wants to sit down and transcribe all the non readable words in a big book but when lots of people enter a single word, even just one word a day, the book will be done in no time.
 
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2/10/2014 4:57 PM
 
cathal connolly


cathal connolly's Avatar

www.cathal.co.uk
Joined: 4/9/2003
Posts: 9676
We actually do that (we refer to it internally as "the boy scout rule) - if an engineer is working on a file they're supposed to check any recommendations our refactoring tool (resharper) makes - we often remove unused private variables, add documentation, inferred variables etc. However there is years worth of undocumented code, some in sections that rarely get touched, and short of the team stopping work on fixing bugs and adding new features (which is not realistic) I don't see us doing substantial documentation in the near term. This is an area we would really welcome contributions in - see https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Pl... for guidance
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