User Manual Feedback and Suggestions

[quote=“Colby.Clegg”]Thanks for your suggestions. We’ve actually just hired a new Technical Writer who will be focused first on the user manual, and then on other helpful materials. We definitely recognize the need for improvement!

Regards,[/quote]

Great idea.
Last people to do documentation on software are the ones that developed it.

I was very happy to meet our new Technical Writer as well as the rest of you, John R. R. Rancher (that’s my name for you and “i’m stickin’ to it”! -adam (in case you didn’t figure it out I was “Adam Austin” at the conference.

Adam, it was also a pleasure to meet you and Albert and Toby. And I too enjoyed meeting and talking with Lisa, the new technical writer. She was very willing to listen to everyone, and I made sure I got my two cents worth in with her. :slight_smile: I think she will be a big asset to IA, and provide the one thing that Ignition needs more than anything else, in my opinion.

I hope she lets us know, through this forum, if she needs anything from the users. I’ve already promised to send her some coding examples to enhance the manual in the scripting and expressions sections. I think many of us will agree that you can’t have too many examples. Syntax is required, but a good example can save you a lot of time when you actually write the code.

In the 7.6.4 manual and online help, the parameter description for the system.user.* functions is missing.

This has been fixed for 7.6.5.

Appendix B / Advanced / runScript:
It would be helpful if this page of the manual included a note that runScript may NOT be used to run app modules (due to expression tags being global scope and app modules being project scoped). I’m hoping this changes with global script modules in v7.7, but until then this limitation is not immediately clear to someone looking at the runScript documentation.

Please, please, please allow us to have accounts on to new docs site! I would like the opportunity to add content, add examples, get notifications of changes, etc. I do not want to be forever known as anonymous and bookmarking items to see if any reply were posted…

Thanks!

Couple of items in the online manual:

  1. Appendix/Scripting Functions/system.sfc/setVariable is shown as: [quote]system.set.setVariable[/quote] when it is actually: [quote]system.sfc.setVariable[/quote]

  2. The discussion only shows how to set a chart-scope variable, but the auto-completion indicates that there is also a way to set a step-scope variable as well.

Also, my browser balked at opening the manual website indicating that the certificate for the page had expired on April 9, 2016.

Thanks,

system.set.setVariable is now fixed. I’ve pinged training on the rest. Thanks!

So, I know how to find the right manual now, but a novice this was a hurdle for me.

1
Problem: There are several ignition user manuals. I assume that there is intended to be one for each supported major revision, but when I was a novice looking for information on how to use a certain module or component, the plurality of resources was confusing.

Suggestion: As a possible solution to this, and to maybe clean up the documentation in part, I suggest merging all the manuals for the different versions into one web-page. Then, in order to keep them separate, add a dropdown list somewhere in the banner so that you can select a revision. Alternatively, it might be interesting to have a “wikipedia-style” change-log available for each article in the manual, organized by software revision.

2
Problem: Another thing along the same topic is the various “old” info pages which have been deleted, but still show up in Google search results.

Suggestion: Since I don’t know if there is an easy way to get specific pages off of the Google search-results list, I suggest leaving redirects behind on each obsoleted page. As far as manuals go, I think that suggestion #1 would partially resolve the problem for future items.

Overall, I’m happy to note the improvements I’m seeing in the user manual over time. Keep up the good work, IA!

I apologize for any confusion the user manual may have introduced. Our Training department has been working tirelessly to make the user manual better than previous versions.

The easiest way to gain access to the user manual for your particular installation would be to go to Help>Help from the Designer menu bar. This will open up the included user manual in your web browser. You can also access the user manual from the link in the upper right corner of your gateway homepage. If you don’t have an internet connection, thats okay, an offline version of the manual will be opened.

Hopefully this post will be helpful to anyone else looking for help on this.

Sen

For the Scripting Functions, would it be possible to expand out the granularity of the Scope description?

At the moment it seems to be limited to Gateway, Perspective Session, and Vision Client. Would it be possible to expand out where the functions can be used in these respective groups, for example: session event scripts, etc.

I have made a few mistakes in the past by misinterpreting the scope incorrectly. Explicitly stating where a function can be used could help prevent this :slight_smile:

I would like to suggest that the Topic Challenges in the Lesson Library be re-take-able at any time, regardless of completion status. I would like to be able to go back and review the topics in each section via the Topic Challenges. Perhaps the “completed” mark could be independent of the retake button.

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On the notification block docs page (Notification Block - Ignition User Manual 8.1 - Ignition Documentation), test mode is said to write to the console. It looks like it actually writes to the Gateway logs instead. Another minor thing - for the “retry delay” the docs page should also list the units (seconds) to match what is in the Designer.

Instead? The gateway wrapper log is the gateway's console.

Fair enough. Ideally the user would know where the pipelines are executing and where their output would appear.

However, considering both the Designer and a Vision Client have their own ‘Console’ areas (with that name), adding the exact wording to the docs page would make it easier for the less experienced and forgetful among us!

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I observed discrepancies in user manual of Ignition 8.1
In Extension Function under “Example-Table Component”,
Column header name of sample data table is “Installations” but in the script “Col 1” string is referred.
Please have a look at this. If we copy script as it is .as mentioned in manual, it does not work as expected.

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Closing this topic, and unpinning it.

2012 was a different time. We now have a docs inbox (docs@inductiveautomation.com, listed in the footer of the user manual), which we’d prefer to use for input.

That being said, nothing wrong with folks creating threads to discuss the user manual on the forums. I just want to remove the pinned post advocating for input to be delivered in this thread.