Enhancements to documentation request

[MarcParticipant]

tl;dr : at first glance, all demo and available documentation materials on the jqwidgets site are impressing. After usage, the gap between the true versatility of the widgets, and the rather incomplete documentation, appears to be high.

Hi,

In another post, I was kindly required to RT*M. Certainly I could have read more, but I’m generally the kind of person that makes extensive use of documentation.

My purpose is not to spend a lot of energy into pointless arguments or dispute, but I just completed the survey that’s proposed at the bottom of the demo page. Here is an extract from the “how can we improve the software”, or whatever the exact name is, section.

In terms of enhancements, what come to mind first, is not the software itself, but the documentation. There are obvious, and very useful, efforts made in both the demo and documentation available on the site. However, the personal time and research required to start using the widgets, is still very high. A lot remain to be documented.

True, each widget has a “getting started” section, but then, the gap between the “getting started” sections of each widget, and the reference material available, is deep.

A lot remain undocumented, too. For example, generally speaking, the callback functions. It took me a while, and a lot of analysis and reviews of the available examples, to understand that, when creating a record from a grid, I needed to call commit(true, data) and not merely commit(true) to get the database generated id. A reply in the forum gave me a first orientation, but not the exact syntax, that still required lot of research.

Similarly, in order to be able to insert a record in a database from a treeGrid, extensive searches in the documentation helped in no way, and only lengthy browsing of examples eventually helped me to understand that the correct parameter list for the addrow function was :

addrow: function (rowId, rowData, position, parentId, commit) {etc}

This is a very short list of many areas in which the documentation need to be improved. My general feeling is that, as often with software development, the effort is spent more on adding functionalities to the widgets, than documenting them. Today, the gap between the true versatility of these widgets and the documentation level, seems to have become high.

I find jqwidget very useful, and hope this post will help still improving it.

Best regards.

[Peter StoevKeymaster]

Hi Marc,

The things which according to you are not documented, actually are. The callback functions as part of the Data Source object are documented in the Data Sources help topics: http://www.jqwidgets.com/jquery-widgets-documentation/documentation/jqxtreegrid/jquery-treegrid-data-sources.htm, http://www.jqwidgets.com/jquery-widgets-documentation/documentation/jqxgrid/jquery-grid-datasources.htm, etc. All of the functionality is documented. Yes, there is a lot of information and sometimes it requires some time to read and search for it especially when you use advanced data visualization widgets such as Grid, TreeGrid, Chart, etc. I would like to assure you that we will keep improving the software’s documentation and will add more how-to tutorials and samples.

Best Regards,
Peter Stoev

jQWidgets Team
http://www.jqwidgets.com/

[aoverton07Participant]

I have been extremely pleased with the documentation, especially the recent addition of the jsfiddle links. Keep up the good work!

[Author]

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