A very helpful addition to SAIL programming would be single-line commenting. The current block commenting method creates hassles when commenting and uncommenting chunks of code for troubleshooting, or when nesting comments, should we follow best practice and document functionality with /* Dev Notes */.
We are currently unable to block-comment with single /* and */ around a section containing actual comments (nested), the first trailing */ ends the surrounding block comment early. This occurs when collapsing a large section spanning a few pages, and add these 2 lines around the collapsed section, which is sometimes easier than highlighting multiple pages for ctrl+/. Example:
/* a!boxLayout( label: "Submitter Info", marginBelow: "STANDARD", contents: { /* Submitter Info */ a!textField( value: loggedInUser(), readOnly: true ) } ) */
Additionally, if you highlight a section containing comments, ctrl+/ to comment all, then ctrl+/ to uncomment all after troubleshooting, your actual comments are un-commented resulting in errors. Try with:
a!boxLayout( label: "Submitter Info", marginBelow: "STANDARD", contents: { /* Submitter Info */ a!textField( value: loggedInUser(), readOnly: true ) } )
Due to this, I find myself utilizing code comments much less than I would like to. Ideally, I would build out comments during dev time, however this hinders my ability to troubleshoot and adjust as I build due to commenting/uncommenting sections when needed, so I tend to leave actual commenting to last, and often fall short on time to backfill all code comments for a project.
All would be alleviated by single-line commenting such as in other programming languages.
Java, Javascript, C, C++, C#: //VB.NET: 'SQL: --Python: #Appian Properties File: ##
An example from SQL:
/* select 1 --comment! select 2 */
Ideally we would have capability such as:
/* a!boxLayout( label: "Submitter Info", marginBelow: "STANDARD", contents: { // Submitter Info // We could block comment around these! a!textField( value: loggedInUser(), readOnly: true ) } ) */
Thoughts/comments welcome! Would love to know if this is on the roadmap!
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
Believe it or not Chris, you actually made this request in 2016 and we're still tracking it :) I'm sorry to say we don't have a planned release for this but it's definitely still on our mind - we often look for small kinds of enhancements like this that can improve the qualify of life for developers and this is on that list as a target of opportunity.
That being said, please keep the requests coming! We're always looking for ideas on ways we can make the product better, both big features and small ones!
At the risk of beating the dead horse a bit, this underscores the potential usefulness of a centralized, curated "official" bug/enhancement request channel accessible to interested parties (nominally an additional aspect to Community; at the very least, a new sub-form for it, but who knows).
Thanks for the context Mike - we understand the ask and we have considered adding something like this (although I don't have any timeline of when it would occur). In speaking for myself I think a mechanism to submit use cases from community directly would be valuable - we just haven't been able to prioritze it yet.
At this time the best way for us to track these are still by submitting support cases, as our support reps have a mechanism both for submitting use cases for product improvements and being able to notify practitioners once features are added that meet the use case.
I've also seen several feature requests submitted as posts here recently - please continue doing so, as it's a great way to collaborate on common things you encounter and give us more context. I know that sometimes it can be frustrating if we haven't made some of the improvements you're looking for yet, but I promise we are listening and feedback within Appian Community is extremely valuable for us! Thanks so much for all of your contributions!
Peter Lewis said:I've also seen several feature requests submitted as posts here recently
I know this probably isn't your "lane" per se, but would it be much of a lift to simply add a new sub-forum here dedicated to feature requests? I know sub-forums here don't do a *whole* lot, but it would at least somewhat centralize such posts and make them easier to sniff out in the future (particularly since text search i.e. searching "feature request" returns rather 'fuzzy' results...) -- cc April Schuppel perhaps?
Thanks for "rather fuzzy results." That expresses my past experience with both JIRA and Google, and yes, quite frequently this forum too.
ugh, these bots are getting ridiculous...
Oh I was wondering - they seemed like coherent comments and I didn't see an obvious link. Thanks for reporting them and helping us maintain the Community
for real...
Then again, i'm happy that the spammers keep floating this thread back to the top. I wish they'd spam my feature-request threads a bit more!
Yea I'll take the free bump