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:
Any of the following would help:
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
Hi Matthew,
We'll definitely take your feedback as actionable for improvement. In this case, it's not necessary to submit a product idea as docs are something we are regularly working on improving. We can use this thread to dig further and ensure we understand what your expectations are. Thanks for taking the time to share!
First, I want to ensure you know about our help on igniteui.com/help. There's a search box in the top right that I was able to use to find results on all your terms pertaining to igGrid. That plus the samples on igniteui.com are what I would consider the best resources to start from when looking for Ignite UI help.
Also, for what it is worth, our main Infragistics help search page will respond decently if you search, for example, iggrid transactions. Then you can use the facets on the left to further filter your search to kinds of results (help topics is a good one to pick there to see what we have as official help).
All of our topics, samples, and API docs should have links to related other help, which can also be helpful when drilling into a particular topic.
I am guessing the larger part of the problem here may be that these search tools we do have are not discoverable. So that we can better meet your expectations, can I ask where you were starting your searches from and where you expected to be able to search from?
When you search Google, do you normally use the site filter function they have or just search all of their index? We definitely have work to do to improve our general help results with them; part of the problem comes from surfacing multiple versions of our product help online, and we are working to help Google know the right ones to surface first. I would also suggest, in the meantime, that you consider using Google site search to narrow your searches; for example: site:help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1 pendingTransaction gives a few targeted, pertinent results, depending on your product version.
What did you mean by "page for all igGrid symbols"?
Thanks again for taking time to give us thoughtful feedback. We definitely appreciate it.
Thanks for the response.
> where you were starting your searches from and where you expected to be able to search from?
I started from what I thought was the jQuery controls home page. http://www.infragistics.com/products/jquery, then click on Grid. From that Overview page I can navigate samples and get to the API documentation: http://help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1/ui.igGrid
But navigated that way, there is no search bar. So one fix might be to unify the help page and the pages I was navigating somehow. Or, make sure there's a search bar in both places.
Note that the search bar does not search the API documentation, just the Help topics. "pendingTransactions" returns nothing, and "pending" doesn't return any links that tell me exactly how to retrieve pending transactions in code.
> What did you mean by "page for all igGrid symbols"?
I just wanted a way to search the entire grid API. I was imagining a single web page that cross-referenced all methods, events, and options of the grid. But a search bar that included the API documentation would probably make more sense.
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?
> consider using Google site search to narrow your searches; for example: site:help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1 pendingTransaction
Thanks, this is useful.
It also illustrates one of the issues I mentioned. Let's say I search for "igGrid pendingTransaction" [EDIT: I used DuckDuckGo-- see followup post for Google.com results]. The second hit(*) looks like the one I was trying to get. But note the link. When I click it I get taken to the overview page for the component. Google is apparently unable to generate a useful URL for the text it indexed. At a minimum I'd want it to go to the correct page (e.g. Options, Events, Methods.) Ideally it would take me to the actual text I searched for.
Thanks for taking the time to understand my feedback better! I appreciate it. If anything I wrote still isn't clear let me know.
Correction. I forgot that my default search engine was not Google, but DuckDuckGo. So the search results I described above are not true in general.
When I do the search "site:help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1 pendingTransaction iggrid " on Google it does not return any of the links to the API docs at all. I'm guessing this is just a variation of the problem I described before, where Google is unable to generate a meaningful URL for the text it indexed. Google doesn't return the result, DuckDuckGo shows it but can't link directly to it. Just a guess though.
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://www.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 PavlovInfragistics, Inc.
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,
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 PavlovInfragistics, Inc.
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!