Documenting programs

[ms2...@gmail.com]

I am a very experienced computer engineer with 40 years of experience. I enjoy very much the concept of visual programming like App inventor. I like to print listings of programs and use them to look for bugs, add remarks and add new parts to the program. When using App Inventor it is very difficult and lengthy process to create such a file which includes the screen appearance and all the blocks of the program. Is there an easy way to write the screens and the blocks to a file without using many "print screens" like in old days? It can be a very handy capability to be able to export the program to a Word file. What do you think about the idea?

Moshe

[Jos Flores]

Hi Moshe,

it is currently not possible but there have been several attempts to
do similar things at different points in time; I'm sure some of those
efforts are still happening in the open source and contributors
community.

App Inventor is fully open source and we are always happy to work with
people that want to contribute. More info here:
http://appinventor.mit.edu/appinventor-sources/

cheers,
José

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[SteveJG]

Try documenting using a html file as the basis.  You keep images separate but can include them in the file you view.  Word wants to embed saved block images (pgn, jpg) in the document and that works.   However, you do not have to do that with an html.   Here are two reasonable free html editors:   Kompozer   and BlueGriffon .   Be aware almost all the app inventor tutorials you can find on the Web are documented using html...a few using pdf.  

Be aware, you can put comments right into your Blocks.... left click a block and look at the options.  Many also document that way and save the aia files.

Also, you can save everything by saving the aia file to your computer.

Also note, a university student is working on a project to build a scripting engine .. the idea is to type text instead of / in addition to   blocks.  When will this be available?  Possibly late this year, if at all.  Once script engine is available, it might be much easier to 'share' code.

I document with html.  But mostly I just keep handwritten notes.  Others may have other suggestions.

Regards,

Steve

[Scott Ferguson]

With your background you might want to look into this:

I took a look at the bky file of one of my projects to see how things were organized.

It looks like any XML file and includes what you would expect:

procedure names, arguments, as well as locations for the blocks on the canvas and data types, etc.

If you would build a parser to extract the data that you need such as procedures, arguments and the text representations of the blocks from that XML file, then you would have your program listing.

You might be able to take a similar approach with the scm screen designer file as well.

---

Scott