[Scripting] In-editor documentation for 3rd party libraries

[Tyler_McLean]

Perhaps there is already a solution to this or a forum post I just didn’t see when I was searching for this, but is there a way to view the pydoc documentation of 3rd party python libraries added into Ignition the same way that 3rd party java scripting modules show up in the editor? I’d even be willing to generate the .properties files similarly.

I have a library I’m working on that we will be able to use in multiple projects/stations that share a lot of repeated business logic. I’d like to be able to hand this off to our engineering teams so that they can build the smaller scale stuff without bugging my IT team but they’ll need documentation.

I can always generate it out-of-band and host it somewhere internally but I’d prefer to have it in the environment they’re writing the scripts in if possible to keep them from getting frustrated when they need to use a new function.

Any help is appreciated
Thanks,
Tyler

[lrose]

Script Library Formatting and Documentation

If you're on 8.1.19 or higher, project library scripts with "docstrings" per Python convention do show up in the autocomplete in other editors: https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC81/Scripting+in+Ignition#ScriptinginIgnition-SystemFunctions,Hints,andAutocomplete If you're on 8.1.32 or higher, if you author those docstrings according to Google's Python style guide, you'll even get nice argument and return value descriptions.

@paul-griffith may have a different answer, but as far as I know it should work so long as you follow the convention.

[paul-griffith]

Basically unchanged since 8.1.whatever when we added docstring parsing. It works for your project library, but not the third party library that's only accessible on disk, which is what I think the OP was talking about.

There are no short term plans to do that, @Tyler_McLean. It's on a long term roadmap, but may end up superseded by other work to just enable external code editors to work with the designer completely.

[Tyler_McLean]

Thanks for the answer Paul. It is as I expected then. All good! I’ll just create the documentation separately then and patiently await the day an external editor like PyCharm works with the designer