Trying to be all fashionable and find out information on how to implement these newfangled “External Methods” rather than the old “Declares”. To the Help Pages! Step 1, pull up the online docs. Wow, these have definitely been streamlined in recent releases, it looks like the old “developer.xojo.com” documentation has been effectively eliminated and replaced with the much more uniform “documentation.xojo.com” (thanks Paul). Step 2, type “External Methods” into the search field (that is what they’re called), and hit return. Nothing. That’s weird. Scrolling through I can’t find reference to “External Methods” anywhere in the search results:
So it turns out that the built in Search engine did return a link to what I was looking for - and what Google returned as the top hit. But It was result #61! For some reason it thinks that “TextArea” and “TextEncoding” are more relevant:
The docs are hosted in Mediawiki the same wiki software used by Wikipedia. I agree with you that the search results are not always the best in terms of ranking and formatting. Hopefully we can improve that. I don’t know how possible it would be to substitute the built-in search engine with Google’s search engine though.
It’s true, most things come right up: “String”, “TextArea”, “Array”, etc., all those searches go directly to the relevant entry. It seems to be when the thing you’re looking for is multi-word, or is a concept, when the result leads to a “Special” results page (i.e. one with the “Special” heading at the top) that things break down. Quoting seems to help if you know the exact phraseology, but I’d still expect it to be at the top of the results and not after three “Release Notes” entries. Cheers.
