How do I find blocks or procedures in large app?

[Gerard_Bucas]

I have a large App Inventor App (around 3000 blocks!) on which I haven't worked for almost 18 months. So am trying to find my way around my logic/blocks!

Is there a way to "go to" a specific procedure or find where a global variable is used in the blocks editor?

Seems almost unmanageble when one has a large number of blocks.

Any tips or help to "find things" in the block editor would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

Gerard

[gordonlu310]

Hi there,

You could try to clean up your blocks this way to make finding easier! Right-click on an empty area of your blocks workspace and select 'Clearn Up Blocks'.

Or, you can use the Zoom In or Out tools on the bottom-right corner of the workspace to find your blocks.

You can also find blocks using Control+F on Windows or Command+F on Mac!

1. If I want to find a block when Screen1. Initialize, I can press Control+F on Windows, and then type in ErrorOccurred.

2. Part of the block is now highlighted.

Hope this helps.

[era_Or]

There's a new browser add-on which helps.
It's not perfect but better than nothing.

Find Blocks - Blocks Finder

[Nicola_Imperati]

Un'altra soluzione per cercare un blocco specifico è recarti direttamente nelle impostazioni del tuo browser e cliccare sull'opzione "Trova".

[Osmany_Ferrer_Borges]

Hi,
AppInventor is is an amazing tool but blocks arrangement is a pain.

Some issues that I find not easy to use
-It is not allowed to select more than one block.
-Paste command does not occur within the shown area after a Cut command.
-The search result tool does not scroll to what was found.

I have worked in other visual block component editors, for instance, TinkerCAD, EasyeEDA, and they offer these possibilities, perhaps that is why the expectations.

I would like to repeat that I greatly appreciate the AppInventor benefits.

Just saying,
Osmany

[ABG]

The new Blockly support may interest you, at

Technical Preview: Blockly v10 Update

Hello everyone, I have deployed an early tech preview server for the next Blockly update. Blockly is the library that drives the App Inventor block editor, and we last updated our copy of Blockly back in 2017! Since then, the Blockly team has made a number of architectural changes to Blockly, including the creation of themes and a plugin system. The theme mechanism will eventually tie into the new UI change to allow for dark theme support. For plugins, we have incorporated a selection of plugin…

We need large (many blocks) projects to compare block manipulation speed.

For the Find feature, check out the AI2Helper browser extension at

FAQ Section: Blocks Editor

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[Martin_Herraiz]

Thanks for letting me know the Control+F function, to find blocks or parts of the code by name. It's really helpful (mainly in large projects, or when you want to modify them after a while).

I would like to make just two suggestions, to improve it (I hope they aren't too complicated to implement):

• 1. To invert the colors that remark the concerned blocks. All the blocks related to the search appear in black, and you can scroll betwen them, going to the part of the screen where this particular block is diplayed in grey. In fact the rest of the concerned blocks (in black color) are much more easy to spot that the selected one (in grey color). I believe that commuting the black an grey colors would help a lot.

• 2 To center the screen on the selected block when you scroll between them (instead of just moving the screen just enough to this block to appear in one of the edges of the screen. Because currently you never know what will be the place where the block will appear (because it depends on in which direction was the block displayed last time)