I noticed that the dropdowns in the top menu, like switching versions, didn't always "take" on the first click. Often having to hover and click again. (Firefox 122.0.1 on Kubuntu 20.04, fwiw.)
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I don't see the
Found a problem? Send us an email: docs@inductiveautomation.com
link at the bottom of each page. I used this a couple of times with the old docs.
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Great to see the docs being update. Thank you for blessing us with Dark Mode. However, extremely disappointed all links in my bookmarks, forum, and google search results are now broken.
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Correct. It's going away
I just started noticing that too. Will keep an eye on it and see what we can do about it.
Good catch! I'll add that back into a future build.
Same. That was one of the things we set out to do initially. Unfortunately there are some fundamental differences with the URLs between both platforms.
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Suffering broken links in exchange for souped-up search seems fair to me. But then, I only had to fix two bookmarks, to the 8.1 and 7.9 intro pages. All of my "bookmarks" into the old docs are here on the forum, not in my browser.
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It looks like the new documentation is missing information that was present in the old documentation.
One example of this is the Perspective Table page used to have the option to expand and show more details in the description column of the Properties table for 'pager'. When expanded it would show the pager property properties like 'options', 'top', 'bottom', etc.. I'm not sure how many other properties are missing their option to show additional information but I'm not seeing the option to expand to show more anywhere so I'm thinking the issue is widespread.
Another issue involving missing information is the function pages not showing function scope without having to open each function. This makes browsing functions to see which are available for vision or perspective scope more difficult. An example is the system.util page.
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It's not great.
At first I thought cool! new manual! but now every time I google a solution to some problem in ignition every link back to the manual is dead. So my bug hunting just got way worse.
So I figured I would just navigate the handy dropdowns on the side menu. Nope. It's dropdown chaos. Having endless nested dropdowns seems like an obviously bad design choice. It only takes a couple of clicks until the side menu is 300 hundred links long with each link nested or not having equal font size, weight, and color. Which means you can't 'explore' the docs because it overwhelms you with visual information extremely quickly. I was just looking for the docs on basic perspective components and couldn't find it. Maybe I can't read or maybe the UI is poor..
Well.. ok there is a search box that looks like its from 2005 up in the corner let's try that. Search 'table'. because I'm just looking for the documentation on that basic perspective component. Returns everything but 'table'.
This is the opposite of good. I'm sure with enough beating my head against the wall I will get used to it. But who was this change supposed to be for?
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I think we will get used to the new system over time. One think that I noticed though is that when you search for table, it will return 923 results as of this writing. I think the search should automatically first check Perspective components because that's what people usually search for (at least I do) and de-prioritize other sections like "New in this version" - that information is way less useful but it comes up first.
How I used the search bar (if it matters) was by component - I know what a Perspective component is called but I need to check some details, so I would go in and type "Table" and it would show Perspective Table Component as the first result. I think you can probably rank the documents, at least the sections they come from, hopefully?
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I would hope that usage stats will be collected to drive the order of search results. That will automatically make the "common" answers come to the top. Just not today.
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Umm, I didn't really feel there was any difference in the way the dropdown worked in the old manual to the way they work in this one.
As for your documentation on basic perspective components:
Literally three clicks:
Appendix > Components > Perspective Components
Just as it's always been.
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Since we're talking about searching by the navigation structure - I think this UI could be slightly improved by changing the font weight or color or something to indicate which level you are at in the tree:
Also, for me personally, splitting up the components into different palettes is way less useful than just listing out every component in alphabetical order, but that's just MO.
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Thanks for pointing that out! One of the goals was to remove the expand panels and let the text sit out in the open (makes for a better experience searching page when you Ctrl+F in your browser). Looks like that page in particular is indeed missing content though, which wasn't intended. I'll get the team on it.
I'm assuming you're referring to the dedicated pages we had that listed the scopes. We'll add those back in. I want to say there were put off intentionally for launch maybe. Regardless, we'll make it right.
We're in the process of updating Google's site indexing. Per their docs it may take some time. Apologies, I know the situation creates a less than enjoyable search experience.
I assuming you're referring to the sidebar. Yep, they were always that deep, even in the old manual.
FWIW we can modify the search UI and functionality. Not a huge priority before launch, but certainly something we can look into. All the same, I appreciate the feedback! Fortunately there's a good number of tweaks we can make to improve things.
Good idea! I was thinking the same thing when I was reviewing things locally earlier in the week.
That's also a good thought. It's a grouping we've stuck to for the last decade+, but yeah maybe it's time to revisit the how those are listed.
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Old manual is available here still:
https://legacy-docs.inductiveautomation.com
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I wouldn't plan on using that. Our IT team is planning on restricting access to that manually internally, for any last minute references we need. We'll be shutting it down in about a week or so anyways.
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Thanks! I don't remember a dedicated page but looking at the old docs with the link Michael provided it was a section on the bottom of the page titled 'Functions by Scope' with expandable: 'Gateway-scoped Functions', 'Vision-scoped Functions', and 'Perspective-scoped Functions.
The expandable content would re-list the same functions as the main page but only include the functions in that scope.
Having a dedicated page would work just as well.
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Ah! My mistake regarding the dedicated page. But yeah we're thinking the same thing. We'll add it back for sure.
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It was a little annoying to have to type exactly the names.
I got exactly the thing I wanted to find though.
Edit: I would trade the other direction I think.
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Maybe you could have the old dead links redirect to a search on the new site?
For example, if the link was:
https://www.docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC81/Item+Types/
The link could redirect to:
https://www.docs.inductiveautomation.com/search?q=Item%20Types
The first result on that search happens to be the correct page.
This way people can at least get closer to what they were looking for.
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