Documentation for Blocks

General Discussion
1

Hello,
I have an app with over 1,300 blocks. Is there any other way to document the program than to download the blocks as an image?
Greetings from Vienna

2

When you have too many blocks spread out over too large a surface area,
the Blocks Editor hits a complexity limit when it tries to generate a blocks.png file for the screen.

There are two main approaches to deal with this:

  • Start a Google Doc with a Table of Contents explaining your app, with sections for Design, Data, Code, including Downloaded Png images of all Events, Procedures, Globals, and with html cross-links for easy navigation. Such a doc becomes easier to read than a complete blocks image, because you have FIND, Next, PREV, back functionality, and you can add paragraphs of commentary around your code. This is my preferred life saver when doing a very large complex app. If you go this route, try to arrange your blocks geographically in a column matching the order of your Table of Contents, then do periodic Clean Up Blocks to pull them inline. This sometimes lowers the load on the Blocks Editor.
  • Reduce your block count:
    • Use parametrized procedures for common code
    • Use Media text files instead of big clumps of text blocks
    • Use generic blocks instead of repeating component event blocks
    • Encode repeating decision patterns into lookup tables loaded from Media csv text files (does your blocks image look like a box of combs?)
    • You don't need a component for every data instance. Reuse those components.
    • If you can't fit data into a ListView or List Picker, show a small subset of the data in an Arrangement and slide it across the larger list of data.
3

Thank you very much.

I have already implemented most of the recommendations according to 2. Those according to 1. I started with MS-Word – but it's a hell of a lot of work!

As an optimistic hobby programmer, I had hoped for a solution that resolves the blocks into individual program lines into a program code (e.g. Java, Basic, etc.).

Best regards

4

You could try to see if Unchive is something that works for you.

5

Thank you, I will try it later - for a beginner it is not easy to understand.
Regards