Feedback on documentation needed! :)

miracules

All: Thanks for the feedback! Many great suggestions. I believe that I can reach a solution that would make all(most) happy :)

giesbert

I personally don't like the inline expansion. I often just scan the functions to check what exists. And if you open one, you have to close it again, otherwise there is too much between 2 functions from the list.
And think of people, checking 5 functions, with similar signatures or names, they open all 5 and then want to scan the list again, they would have to open all 5 (which are one under the other) and close all of them again. In the old docs, you jump to one with one click and have all 5 one under the other. And going back to the list is just one click then.

thebootroo

i agree with Gerolf above : the button must be placed before the text, to be all time at the same place.

SimonL

would be fine with a expand all for when its needed however if we decided to keep the old style being able to link to the return type and paramater types from the list of methods at the top of the page would be a useful additional feature

andre

Would it be a good idea to have the possibility to also show the inherited methods in the overview in a nice way? It is easy to miss methods or signals that have been defined in base classes, and it would be nice if you could augment the current overview with them. Coolest would be if you could that step-by-step. For instance, if you are viewing the docs on QSslSocket, you could expand the docs like this:

QSslSocket specific stuff (default view)

add QTcpSocket specific methods (the ones not reimplemented by QSslSocket)

add QAbstractSocket specific methods (the ones not reimplemented by the above subclasses)

add QIODevice specific methods (the ones not reimplemented by the above subclasses)

finally add QObject methods.

Methods added to the docs from a baseclass, should probably be marked as such with an [Inherited from <ClassName>] kind of label.

goetz

A very good idea, Andre! I would appreciate this.

mlong

That's a great idea, Andre. I would be behind that 100%.

thisisbhaskar

like the new way with few suggestions

Like others said, expand button goes to the beginning of the line. Generally function names are of various character lengths. If we have expand button at the end, we may need to search for them.
Do we need this line explanation for each method. Does it convey any useful information. If we remove it, its almost same as good old layout, and we gave expand buttons added at the beginning of each method / property.
We need to have collapse all button readily available somewhere in each page. Otherwise we end up with same problem that we have now.

timoph

Seems that links inside the code blocks have some issues and the link url are visible. You can see the issue in for example http://developer.qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-4.7/qdeclarativeimageprovider.html

@<a href="qdeclarativeimageprovider.html">Image</a> { source: "image://myimageprovider/image.png" }@

Otherwise liking the new style docs.

miracules

Andre: I agree that inherited members should be displayed in a better way. Actually, they are now in the lists with the other class members, so they should be easy to find now. It can probably be done (with the current documentation XML source) in the way that you describe, but it will require a heavy reconstruction. It will be up to the web team to decide upon this. I’ll make sure to put it in the pile of requests. :)

Vijay: Thanks, we are testing different solutions right now. I’m including your input in the case. :)

timoph: Thanks, we have discovered a flaw in the syntax highlighter, so we will remove the links inside code snippets for now.

kaznovac

this new idea is nice and will reduce scrolling for quite a bit

the link to expand function definition is too small,
something like jiras road map would be easier to use with nice wide target

as long as you have easy accessible options for expand/collapse all
the browser text search won't be a problem
in most cases i don't believe that search through long description would be unnecessary

what i would like to add are filters/sort by:

function return type
function arguments contain a type
inherited from

thisisbhaskar

few more comments...

Most of the qt function names are self explanatory, don't know how much benefit we get by adding one line description to them.
When a method is in expanded state, we can add "collapse all" button next to collapse button of the method
And there should be a global "collapse all" button available.
Along with #include for the header file, it would be nice to say if there is any qt module that needs to be included in .pro file. I have seen lot of posts in the internet complaining about compile time errors with out including needed qt modules in .pro file.