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Author Topic: How many characters is enough?  (Read 56669 times)

Tark

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #15 on: March 30, 2016, 05:46:46 PM »
Since we are talking about documentation, one of the things I liked about DirectSOFT, that's not in Do-More, is when you open the documentation editor all the elements are shown.  This makes it nice when entering documentation, you can see what you have entered and what elements you haven't used.  It also makes it nice to see that all your data points are blocked together, that you didn't skip a variable by mistake.  It would be nice to have an option to display all memory locations available or to display only the memory locations for which nicknames have been assigned.

It would also be nice if the Documentation Editor contained a dropdown list or tabs for displaying only the selected memory types.  Having to scroll through the entire memory list of memory to get to the Modbus Holding Registers elements isn't ideal, to be able to display only the MHR or R or combinations of memory types would be more user friendly.

And this might just be something that annoys me but, when using the Add Documentation Record window, when adding documentation for a bit of word, say MHR105:0, when you enter that record the window increments to the bit of the next word, so it would go to MHR106:0 when I would hope it would go to MHR105:1. When entering documentation for bits of a word I usually enter all the bits of the word before moving on to the next word.

BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #16 on: March 30, 2016, 06:22:44 PM »
Since we are talking about documentation, one of the things I liked about DirectSOFT, that's not in Do-More, is when you open the documentation editor all the elements are shown.  This makes it nice when entering documentation, you can see what you have entered and what elements you haven't used.  It also makes it nice to see that all your data points are blocked together, that you didn't skip a variable by mistake.  It would be nice to have an option to display all memory locations available or to display only the memory locations for which nicknames have been assigned.

DL's memory maps were tiny compared to Do-more. Plus, with the ability to document a cast, a single D location has over 40 possible variants. It gets ugly fast. The list could easily contain over 2M items in a facility that was originally designed to handle 1000s. Our best attempt at giving you what you want is the ranged record mode in the Add Record dialog. Not optimal, but with very minimal extra effort you can get full ranges of elements.

We are kicking around the idea of automatically adding records for all installed I/O.

It would also be nice if the Documentation Editor contained a dropdown list or tabs for displaying only the selected memory types.  Having to scroll through the entire memory list of memory to get to the Modbus Holding Registers elements isn't ideal, to be able to display only the MHR or R or combinations of memory types would be more user friendly.

I like the idea of filters.

And this might just be something that annoys me but, when using the Add Documentation Record window, when adding documentation for a bit of word, say MHR105:0, when you enter that record the window increments to the bit of the next word, so it would go to MHR106:0 when I would hope it would go to MHR105:1. When entering documentation for bits of a word I usually enter all the bits of the word before moving on to the next word.

It's doable, just gotta get the new hardware done first. When that was originally written, I don't think were were documenting casts.
"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

Mike Nash

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #17 on: March 30, 2016, 06:28:52 PM »
Fill Documentation Records -

Element Nickname  Description
C10     Josy01    Josie 01

It will give
C11     Josy2     Josie 01

What happened to the leading 0 in Josy01 carrying to Josy02? Josy_01 is also Josy_2

Same happens in "Add" in Doc Editor when "Keep Record Content..." is checked.

(I just had a weird one happen in Fill, it gave me a bunch of C2 - #Josy-# or something entries, but I can not duplicate it, so I don't know what I did.)

(Fred gets tired of being my test nickname.)

plcnut

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #18 on: March 30, 2016, 06:36:34 PM »
(Fred gets tired of being my test nickname.)

Try Bob. (Or BobO if that doesn't work) ;D
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BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #19 on: March 30, 2016, 07:01:57 PM »
Had a short time to implement Fill in response to a customer request just before shipping 1.4. Simple rule set was the only way to get it done in the time available. Choice was "you can have it awesome and get it next year" or "have it good enough and get it now".
"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #20 on: March 30, 2016, 07:05:09 PM »
(Fred gets tired of being my test nickname.)

Try Bob. (Or BobO if that doesn't work) ;D

Flintstones. Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Pebbles, Bam Bam, Dino, and on rare occasions even Mr. Slate.
"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

Mike Nash

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #21 on: March 30, 2016, 07:37:27 PM »
Had a short time to implement Fill in response to a customer request just before shipping 1.4. Simple rule set was the only way to get it done in the time available. Choice was "you can have it awesome and get it next year" or "have it good enough and get it now".

I just thought I had better ask. I seem to miss the obvious on occasion. Then again, doing things a little different than other folks means I get to find lots of hidden "features". I've got quite a list started this past couple of weeks on C-more unfortunately.

BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #22 on: March 30, 2016, 07:43:14 PM »
By all means...ask when in doubt. That's why we have this forum.
"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

ATU

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #23 on: March 31, 2016, 07:11:08 AM »
And one other thing...

In our discussions about adding a documentation grouping mechanism, we did discus the possibility of treating the group name act like a class name, hence "Group.Item" might become a reality, not as an adornment of a nickname, but as a legitimate object concept. I'm also thinking that if a documentation group could be flagged as belonging to a program or task block, scoping might fall out of that. But I don't want to overly complicate it from the onset, preferring to get the basic group thing working and see where it leads.

 :) :) :) :)

boardmaker

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #24 on: March 31, 2016, 09:49:00 AM »
Glad you guys are doing this.  I never seem to have enough. 
Sometimes I feel like I'm writing a book but with my memory, I need all the help I can get. ;D

BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #25 on: March 31, 2016, 10:38:32 AM »
The original vision for groups in documentation was simply organization. You create a group, you assign a doc record to a group, you sort the order of groups or records in a group, and the group could be hidden or shown independently.

But now we are seeing how this could blossom into something a bit more useful, where groups become scopes, and in essence define an object. A couple of questions that come out of that:
1. When using groups strictly for organization, and while keeping the field name globally unique, it wouldn't be necessary or advantageous to require the full name (group.element.field) to be entered or displayed, while for true objects, the group name would be required for uniqueness. Would it bother anyone if we required groups to be created as organizational vs object?
2. Since we are also adding user defined structure elements, there is clearly some overlap here. Do you construct your structure concept as true structures contiguous in memory and able to be added as memory blocks, but with the limitation of containing simple types only, or do you construct your structures as documentation objects, with the advantage of being able to contain any valid element...even strings and other structures...but only as random heterogeneous memory?
3. And lastly, does the #2 makes things complicated to the point that folks get confused?

I very much like where this is going, but I fear that like so many things in Do-more, we'll offer too many ways to solve the same problem and users will get confused.

"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #26 on: March 31, 2016, 11:48:39 AM »
After more internal discussion, we are trending toward eliminating the organizational concept and consolidating everything under a single namespace concept. If you use a namespace, the namespace.record name must be globally unique. Records outside a namespace must be globally unique, which really just means that they must be unique to the implied global namespace.

The other thing we like is the ability to create a copy of a namespace. Click the namespace, select create new from selected, and then we give you a dialog with all of the source namespace's records stubbed. You then enter the new namespace name, target memory addresses for each field, and we create the new namespace that matches the source.

Old-school users can continue to use the global namespace with shiny new 32 character nicknames, but the cool kids can go full OO. Win/win.

And yes Steve, you will be able to have symbolic constants in a namespace...so MaxFlow, Pump1.MaxFlow, Pump2.MaxFlow could be three different constants. And since a structure could be included in a namespace, we're kinda nesting structures too. ;)
"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

ATU

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #27 on: March 31, 2016, 12:59:12 PM »
Global scope is fine with me. Having the ability to copy an entire group of variables will be a big time saver. Many times you are working on systems that have similar, if not identical parts, which would make it easy to copy data sets and not have to do the export/import thing from Excel. 

BobO

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #28 on: March 31, 2016, 03:36:42 PM »
Once we have a facility for cloning a namespace, I'm sure it could easily adapt to cloning a selected range of records, one being a subset of the other.
"It has recently come to our attention that users spend 95% of their time using 5% of the available features. That might be relevant." -BobO

Mike Nash

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Re: How many characters is enough?
« Reply #29 on: March 10, 2017, 06:18:30 PM »
Since we are talking about documentation, one of the things I liked about DirectSOFT, that's not in Do-More, is when you open the documentation editor all the elements are shown.  This makes it nice when entering documentation, you can see what you have entered and what elements you haven't used.  It also makes it nice to see that all your data points are blocked together, that you didn't skip a variable by mistake.  It would be nice to have an option to display all memory locations available or to display only the memory locations for which nicknames have been assigned.

DL's memory maps were tiny compared to Do-more. Plus, with the ability to document a cast, a single D location has over 40 possible variants. It gets ugly fast. The list could easily contain over 2M items in a facility that was originally designed to handle 1000s. Our best attempt at giving you what you want is the ranged record mode in the Add Record dialog. Not optimal, but with very minimal extra effort you can get full ranges of elements.

We are kicking around the idea of automatically adding records for all installed I/O.

It would also be nice if the Documentation Editor contained a dropdown list or tabs for displaying only the selected memory types.  Having to scroll through the entire memory list of memory to get to the Modbus Holding Registers elements isn't ideal, to be able to display only the MHR or R or combinations of memory types would be more user friendly.

I like the idea of filters.

And this might just be something that annoys me but, when using the Add Documentation Record window, when adding documentation for a bit of word, say MHR105:0, when you enter that record the window increments to the bit of the next word, so it would go to MHR106:0 when I would hope it would go to MHR105:1. When entering documentation for bits of a word I usually enter all the bits of the word before moving on to the next word.

It's doable, just gotta get the new hardware done first. When that was originally written, I don't think were were documenting casts.

Just today I was trying to get the bits of words added for documentation in v2.0.3 and I found it still doesn't seem possible to add N100:0 thru N100:15. I know the BRX priority thing took precendence, but hopefully you can find some time to help us out with this soonish. I have been documenting literally thousands of memory locations today due to Modbus stuff. Excel works, but sometimes it feels like it really wants to mess with me when it comes to retaining double quotes or searching and replacing without hosing other things.

Also, is it possible to export a program, pull out just the logic mnemonics, edit them and import back just the rungs I want into the existing program? So far I have only succeeded with the import as a new program and that means lots of things cause it to fail if they are not there yet (setting up the SERIO-4s for example.)