I’ve got some great news for those of you who use Dash from Kapeli to view your technical documentation. Long story short, I’ve been working on getting the Xojo API2 docs into Dash for quite some time now and it’s finally here!
Here are the steps to install the new docset…
Go to Dash
Open the Settings
Go to the Downloads tab
Click on User Contributed in the left hand pane
Search for Xojo
The first listing there will be Xojo
Press Download or the popup arrow to view that it’s 2023r4
One thing to note is that as part of the generation, I disabled the left navigation bar that is normally seen in the HTML Xojo docs as navigation is covered by Dash itself.
For those who might be interested in the journey to get here, I’ll elaborate. Being a full time Dash user, just like everyone else I’ve been relegated to the old API1 docsets. In mid-August of this year Bogdan at Kapeli rolled out a new Docset Generator to automatically create your own docset based upon an HTML source. I put it through its paces with the latest Xojo API2 documentation at the time, but it didn’t produce the result I was looking for.
Towards the end of the month I reached out to Bogdan and asked if you could update his internal docsets of Xojo to API2 and I noted that things had switched over to Sphinx for the HTML generation. Then towards the end of November a new version of Dash rolled out and lo and behold, it included support for Sphinx within the Docset Generator.
I got to working on a User Contributed but hosted by Kapeli docset. With lots of changes and back and forth with Bogdan over the holidays, the final hurdle was some kind of an index bug in the Sphinx side of the Docset Generator. He just fixed this yesterday, I recreated the docset last night and early this morning the Docset went live.
@Patrick_Salo
Newest docset available is 2021r3.1
I am not finding the docset for 2023r4 as you said is available.
And the oldest one is 2019r3.2
It would be nice to be available 2019r1.1 (latest Web1.0 xojo version)
After a bit of time in the queue with Kapeli, the Xojo DocSet for Dash has been updated to 2024r1.
Unfortunately it appears to have replaced the 2023r4 version. I’ve reached out to Bogdan to see what can be done to retain prior versions of the DocSets (e.g. similar to the listing you get when looking under the Main DocSets when you press the disclosure button).
I’ll keep everyone updated and sorry for any churn for those of you not moving up to 2024r1 yet. that this will be worked out soon.
Looks like a configuration problem on my end and Bogdan @ Kapeli provided the guidance I needed. He merged things in earlier tonight and everyone should be all set.
If you press the popup (disclosure) arrow as defined in Step 7, you’ll now see 2024r1 and 2023r4 as the Docsets that you can download.
Also if anyone sees this post and is looking for API1 compatible Docsets, instead of looking in the User Contributed in Step 4, look in the Main Docsets section where you’ll find older Docsets Bogdan created several years ago. As of this writing I’m seeing 2019r3.2 through 2021r3.1.
Personally I wouldn’t consider 2019r3.2 to be fully API2 compatible. There’s some API2 there, but there’s also lots of deprecations and slight language changes since then. One of my motivations to create a Docset using the newer documentation version is because Project Analyze would regularly flag parts of my code when I use the following analysis warning:
Item is deprecated. You should use Item instead
The root cause was that I was using older documentation and not using the newer vernacular of API2 everywhere.
The other question folks might have, is why even have a Docset for 2024r1 when 2023r4 would likely suffice? It’s things like the new ShowPopover method in DesktopWindow that will only be found under 2024r1 plus any other general documentation fixes or improvements the Xojo team has made. So ideally one would want to pair the precise Xojo Docset version to the actual Xojo version they’re using (or as close as possible).
I’ve reached out to Bogdan to see what can be done to retain prior versions of the DocSets (e.g. similar to the listing you get when looking under the Main DocSets when you press the disclosure button).
that this will be worked out soon.
at all…