Digital Workshop

Wow! How long has that "comment" icon been on the actions page?

I have so often wanted to test whether or not actions were right without having to delete them altogether.

I'm so happy..... it's sad, really!

Linda,

I think it was added for the release of 5.

Regards

Brenden Knifton

For those who may not be aware of what Linda was marvelling about -- Go into an Object's Actions. If you've got a Trigger and some Actions under it, highlight one of the Actions and do a RIGHT mouse click. At the bottom of the list is "Comment." If you select this, then that Action will be grayed out and OPUS will skip past it in Preview (only). I believe I read that anything which is accidently not un-Commented will still run when Published.

This feature is used to help you test and trouble shoot. As Linda mentioned, you don't have to delete your Actions for testing. It has proven very helpful in complex projects. Programmers will be familar with the phrase "commenting out lines of code" for testing.

The "commenting out" of actions and triggers is temporary and only effects the current run of Opus.

If an action/trigger is disabled it will not be published - however if you close Opus and re-open it the commented actions will be restored to their normal state.

This feature is intended as an aid to speed development, so when you're happy with the way something is working, delete (or move to a "scratch" object) any actions/triggers you have commented out. This avoids any problems with forgetting actions that were disabled.

Duncan,

does that make any sense? I think this feature would be more useful if the out commented actions stay out commented until the users uncomments them.

Sometimes one has to out comment a lot of actions on several pages. In this case the whole work has to be done again after restart which could be annoying.

T.

It is intended as a simple temporary debugging and development tool - so you only use it for a short period while working on a page; not rely on it as part of a finished design.

We may consider changing this for a future version but I can't promise.

thanks for your reply. I would very appreciate this change.

T.

To put a contrary view, I would prefer the operation of "Commenting out" to remain as it is. If it is changed as suggested, I believe the permancy or otherwise should be an optional issue, perhaps set in Tools, or by using a different icon to differentiate.

I use it regularly to debug complex actions on the current page. I have never (yet ) found it necessary to comment out actions multiple pages.

Once I have corrected the issue, I try to remember to remove the comments, but it's good to know that my forgetfulness is automatically corrected when I reload the pub.

Hi Ray,

I get your point. In comparision to other development environments the temporary comments are a little bit uncommon though. I think your idea of making this optional would be a good solution.

T.