Online documentation scenario & suggestions

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Matthew Diamond posted over 9 years ago

I see in another post that you are working to improve your documentation. I've been wrestling with the igGrid online documentation myself, and I thought it might be useful to you to see the kinds of problems I was having.

Background: I was looking for a way to detect whether the user had any unsaved changes in the igGrid.

Even though I knew roughly what I was looking for, the pendingTransactions method was almost impossible to find:

I searched for keywords like "unsaved", "pending", "changes", "edits", "updates", "transactions", didn't find anything. First of all, it's under igGrid, not iggridUpdating where I did most of my searches. Secondly, it's a Method, not an Option. In other words, to find things I have to search on multiple pages, click the Expand button, then try a bunch of keywords.
Then I spent time on the wrong approach (dataDirty) because it was the only thing I found that seemed to fit. I posted in the forum, and a tech explained why it wasn't going to do what I wanted.
I don't remember exactly how I then came across pendingTransactions, but clearly some luck was involved. :-)
Even now that I know the name "pendingTransactions" I had trouble finding it again the next day. I had tried to save a link to it by right-clicking on it but that doesn't work (I see how to do it now.) So I had to search all the pages again.
Googling "iggrid pendingTransactions" fails to return any documentation links I can actually navigate to. It does show some forum posts. The sample code it finds is all for ASP.NET though.

Any of the following would help:

Make the documentation work better with Google and other web searches, so they return usable links
Have a documentation search function built in to your website
Have an index page for all igGrid symbols
Have a downloadable PDF of the entire documentation I could search.
It would be nice if I could right-click on a link in the documentation and get the URL, instead of the # hack.

igGrid's sample code has been very useful, and your support is top-notch. I feel the documentation is the weak spot, for the reasons I state above.

Hope this helps,

Matt

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Ambrose Little posted over 9 years ago

Hi Matthew,

We'll definitely take your feedback as actionable for improvement. In this case, it's not necessary to submit a product idea as docs are something we are regularly working on improving. We can use this thread to dig further and ensure we understand what your expectations are. Thanks for taking the time to share!

First, I want to ensure you know about our help on igniteui.com/help. There's a search box in the top right that I was able to use to find results on all your terms pertaining to igGrid. That plus the samples on igniteui.com are what I would consider the best resources to start from when looking for Ignite UI help.

Also, for what it is worth, our main Infragistics help search page will respond decently if you search, for example, iggrid transactions. Then you can use the facets on the left to further filter your search to kinds of results (help topics is a good one to pick there to see what we have as official help).

All of our topics, samples, and API docs should have links to related other help, which can also be helpful when drilling into a particular topic.

I am guessing the larger part of the problem here may be that these search tools we do have are not discoverable. So that we can better meet your expectations, can I ask where you were starting your searches from and where you expected to be able to search from?

When you search Google, do you normally use the site filter function they have or just search all of their index? We definitely have work to do to improve our general help results with them; part of the problem comes from surfacing multiple versions of our product help online, and we are working to help Google know the right ones to surface first. I would also suggest, in the meantime, that you consider using Google site search to narrow your searches; for example: site:help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1 pendingTransaction gives a few targeted, pertinent results, depending on your product version.

What did you mean by "page for all igGrid symbols"?

Thanks again for taking time to give us thoughtful feedback. We definitely appreciate it.
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Matthew Diamond posted over 9 years ago in reply to Ambrose Little

Thanks for the response.

> where you were starting your searches from and where you expected to be able to search from?

I started from what I thought was the jQuery controls home page. http://es.infragistics.com/products/jquery, then click on Grid. From that Overview page I can navigate samples and get to the API documentation: http://help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1/ui.igGrid

But navigated that way, there is no search bar. So one fix might be to unify the help page and the pages I was navigating somehow. Or, make sure there's a search bar in both places.

Note that the search bar does not search the API documentation, just the Help topics. "pendingTransactions" returns nothing, and "pending" doesn't return any links that tell me exactly how to retrieve pending transactions in code.

> What did you mean by "page for all igGrid symbols"?

I just wanted a way to search the entire grid API. I was imagining a single web page that cross-referenced all methods, events, and options of the grid. But a search bar that included the API documentation would probably make more sense.

Speaking of documentation: another post here suggested that grid API docs could be downloaded, but I haven't found them. Can someone tell me where to look?

> consider using Google site search to narrow your searches; for example: site:help.infragistics.com/jQuery/2015.1 pendingTransaction

Thanks, this is useful.

It also illustrates one of the issues I mentioned. Let's say I search for "igGrid pendingTransaction" [EDIT: I used DuckDuckGo-- see followup post for Google.com results]. The second hit(*) looks like the one I was trying to get. But note the link. When I click it I get taken to the overview page for the component. Google is apparently unable to generate a useful URL for the text it indexed. At a minimum I'd want it to go to the correct page (e.g. Options, Events, Methods.) Ideally it would take me to the actual text I searched for.

Thanks for taking the time to understand my feedback better! I appreciate it. If anything I wrote still isn't clear let me know.
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