I’ve been using Dash for a while now. It’s a nifty Mac app that lets you browse APIs and documentation sets (docsets) for loads of programming languages.
The offline docs for Xojo have been improved a lot (thanks to Xojo’s Norman Palardy) but Dash lets you do a lot of cool things like assign global hotkeys, save code snippets and is generally just a lot faster at searching than the local MediaWiki installation that Xojo uses for its offline documentation.
I’ve just finished creating a docset for Xojo so now you can browse your favourite language offline using Dash.
It’s completely free of charge to use the docset - I’m just trying to give something back to the Xojo community. To get the docset, simply install Dash and then visit the following url in your browser:
This will automatically subscribe your to my docset feed so you’ll always have the most up-to-date Xojo docs. I’ve written a small utility app to convert the current Xojo offline docs database into a Dash docset and I will open source this (hopefully) later today.
I am literally just putting the finishing touches to the utility app (written in Xojo, called ‘Dasho’) I made which automates the process. I will open source the Bitbucket Mercurial repository I’m using so you can create docsets yourself if you like.
To create the docset you simply tell Dasho the location of the database that Xojo uses for it’s offline documentation (usually it’s in Library/Application Support/Xojo/Xojo//OfflineHelp/REALStudioWDB) and it will build a complete Dash docset for you. Here’s what the app actually does:
Grabs the page source for each HTML file in the database (there’s about 4500!)
Rewrites every single link in the page source
Inserts every class, method, module, etc into the newly created docset’s database
I also tweaked the CSS used by Xojo to make it look less like a MediaWiki dump when viewed in Dash.
As an avid Dash & Xojo user, I’ll update my feed with every new Xojo release.
Yep. So long as you subscribe to the feed I specified above (or make your own feed or create your own docset using the tool I will open source soon).
Thanks very much for this. Not only for supplying the Xojo feed, but cluing me into Dash. Took me 5 minutes of use to realize that this is a great time saver.
I’ve just written a short blog post about using this docset with Dash.
The tool I wrote (Dasho) to convert the Xojo docs to a docset will be open source. The Mercurial repository is on BitBucket already but since I wrote Dasho using Xojo Release 2 beta I won’t publish the link until Xojo formally release Release 2 (purely because it’s saved in the newer version). Once they do this you’ll be able to build Dasho from source (if you like, otherwise just subscribe to the above feed and your docset will stay up-to-date automagically).
A compiled Cocoa build of Dasho can be grabbed from here.
If you are a current beta tester then I can provide you with the source code to play with until the repo becomes public - just check out the post I made in the Beta channel.
[quote=19331:@Paul Sondervan]It would be nice to have Xojo Syntax highlighting too.
Does anybody know how to add the Xojo Syntax highlighting to Dash?[/quote]
Doesn’t it already?
I love it. Thanks for sharing your hard work with the community. One thing to note. In my installation, entries under ListBox seems to duplicate itself twice. I’m not at my computer now, but I think it is under the methods IIRC.
Garry,
That is highlighting in the documentation.
I mean syntax highlighting in the code snippets.
Xojo isn’t a part of the Language syntax highlighting list.
[quote=19344:@Paul Sondervan]Garry,
That is highlighting in the documentation.
I mean syntax highlighting in the code snippets.
Xojo isn’t a part of the Language syntax highlighting list.[/quote]
Ah, I see. Perhaps I’ll add that to my to-do-list
Yep, that looks like a bug to me. Sorry about that. Not sure why that’s happening though since there is only one HTML file for each of those methods and one entry in the SQLite database. I might fling an email to the Dash author to see if he can figure it out…
