Author Topic: A thought on a searchable map of settings  (Read 4572 times)

StR

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A thought on a searchable map of settings
« on: September 18, 2015, 11:09:34 pm »
Kostya,

While reading posts on these forum, I saw that many users have expressed that it was hard to find certain app settings. That indicated to me it wasn't just my impression. (And if IIRC, you acknowledged this difficulty yourself.)

So, I thought I'd share an idea of what might be a reasonable solution (even if a stop-gap measure).
I suspect you have the menus in some XML format, or something close to that that can be easily converted into XML. If so, you can display that XML as a text tree (possibly even collapsible) on a webpage.
The advantage of the text tree (as opposed to an image with the XML tree) is that it is easily searchable (Ctrl-F).

There are plenty of solutions of how to display an XML tree.
(Examples: XSLT http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_xsl.asp , Javascript based viewer , e.g. http://www.levmuchnik.net/Content/ProgrammingTips/WEB/XMLDisplay/DisplayXMLFileWithJavascript.html )
I am sure you can find easily what you like and can implement on your website without too much work.

Such a tree would allow:
1. Searching by keywords;
2. Referring to a particular item
(For that, you might consider enabling references via <a name= ... > http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_name.asp or <a id= ... > - for HTML5 compatibility http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_id.asp );
3. Referencing FAQ items from this tree and vice versa.

In addition, it would be easy to maintain (update). And if you'd decide to go fancy at some point, you might even think about multilingual version (allowing to choose another language).

My apology if you have thought about all of these already and have made some decision (e.g. not needed, or might do later).

Kostya Vasilyev

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Re: A thought on a searchable map of settings
« Reply #1 on: September 18, 2015, 11:44:32 pm »
Yes, it's XML down there somewhere, but the actual runtime is Android's Preference classes.

Not to say that search wouldn't be possible to add (but there are other things I'm trying to focus on right now).
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