Progress OpenEdge Documentation Set for Dash Documentation and Snippets Browser

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Updated Documentation for 11.5/11.6/11.7:

I have created a docset library for the OpenEdge documentation, to make it easy to view and search the documentation easily offline.

This is compatible with Dash. Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 150+ APIs.

You can find out more information about Dash for Mac OS X here:

Dash for macOS - API Documentation Browser, Snippet Manager - Kapeli

And information about Dash for iOS is here:

Dash for iOS - Documentation Browser for 200+ APIs - Kapeli

Velocity (Dash Compatible for Windows):

Velocity - The Documentation and Docset Viewer for Windows
 
Last edited:

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
If you are using the Mac OS X Client, you can now automatically download the OpenEdge docset without having to download it from here manually.

screen-shot-2015-01-20-at-12-09-09-pm-png.1312
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Until now I hadn't heard of Dash and the docset format. Not having a Mac, I looked for a Windows alternative. I found Zeal (http://zealdocs.org), an open-source Dash-compatible API browser for Linux and Windows.

The OpenEdge docset loses a little in the translation, though I'm not sure if that's because of PSC's HTML, Zeal, or the conversion process that created the docset. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to view the section hierarchy of an individual guide, or even a list of the guides. The "Guides" category consists of a list of what appear to be section headings within the text. It does seem to do a much better job with the language side of things (events, statements, methods, etc.).

That said, this tool does excel at text searches. It's just instantaneous; far superior to searching in any PDF tool. So it's great for a quick syntax lookup, and for those times when you just want a fast text search across all the docs.

Thanks for this Chris! I've added it to my OE documentation toolkit.
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Until now I hadn't heard of Dash and the docset format. Not having a Mac, I looked for a Windows alternative. I found Zeal (http://zealdocs.org), an open-source Dash-compatible API browser for Linux and Windows.

Yes, Velocity is an "official" client for Windows, but Zealdocs is available for both Linux and Windows and is open source.

The OpenEdge docset loses a little in the translation, though I'm not sure if that's because of PSC's HTML, Zeal, or the conversion process that created the docset. For instance there doesn't seem to be a way to view the section hierarchy of an individual guide, or even a list of the guides. The "Guides" category consists of a list of what appear to be section headings within the text. It does seem to do a much better job with the language side of things (events, statements, methods, etc.).

It is a combination of all 3 of those items.

The PSC HTML is ugly, if you've ever taken a good look at it and the amount of JavaScript it contains. The "fake" page load progress bar is the worse. By default, every HTML page reloads itself with index.html, which shows a search bar and navigation. I had to take this out for a couple of reason: First it didn't work at all when using a UIWebView container in iOS, so the docs were useless on an iPad or iPhone. Second was to save on space. The docset can (and is setup) to have an index page load, which can be used to display the contents and let you drill down into sections.

The conversion was a bit of a challenge as well. Had to deal with filename with url encoding and unicode characters. I also made assumptions on what pages should go into what section, with everything else going into the "Guides". I wish that you were able to setup either custom sections or sub-sections, but this isn't possible at the moment. So the sections are named like "title : book : area", such as "LOOKUP Function : ABL Reference : OpenEdge Development".

Here is the Python Code that I used for the conversion process:

I am sure I'll be tweaking this code in the future, and will implement any suggestions as well.

That said, this tool does excel at text searches. It's just instantaneous; far superior to searching in any PDF tool. So it's great for a quick syntax lookup, and for those times when you just want a fast text search across all the docs.

That's what I really like, the searches are super quick, and I can search all of my documentation like Objective-C/Swift, HTML, CSS, jQuery, BootStrap, Node.js, etc. all from within either the app, or almost any code editor that I use.

Thanks for this Chris! I've added it to my OE documentation toolkit.

No problem at all! I hope people find this to be useful.
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Having played with it a bit, it looks like it doesn't actually provide a fully-indexed search of all of the text in the docs. For example I can search for "proutil" and get all proutil command qualifier listings, or search for "idxbuild" and get the listing for the proutil idxbuild qualifier. But if I search for an idxbuild parameter like "pfactor" or "datascanthreads" I get no hits. So it might be only the section titles that are indexed. :(
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Rob,

Yes that is correct, the search will work on the page section titles, but doesn't actually search inside of the html of each page. I tried the search that Progress includes on the index.html, and it works the same way, searching only page title and not content. It would be nice if it could give an option to search the html, I'll submit that as an enhancement request.

I also updated the docset so that the index.html page is displayed by default when you first open the documentation, or if you aren't on a specific section. This will let you drill down using the table of contents included with the documentation.

You can download the update now and check it out.
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Thanks, that helped. I now get full text search with the Progress search box in the HTML page. Also, access to the navigation pane allows browsing by manual and section.
 

Den Duze

Member
Hey Chris,
I also tried this with Zeal and it looks nice and usefull but I also installed some other docsets that I can use in the future.
Now I want to use the search capability form Zeal to search just in a specific docset but I can't seem to do that with the OpenEdge docset?
When I search javascript:<something> I will only get the results from the JavaScript docset but when I try OpenEdge:<something> or Progress:<something> I get no results @all.

Do we have to provide some other selector? I think the selector is OpenEdge: but I'm not sure?
Is that something that must be provided in your docset or is that something wrong in the Zeal application (it works with other docsets)

regards
Didier
 

Marcelo Dumke

New Member
Hello Chris, I'm from Brazil and your application is not available in my store. Do you have a request to make him available to the whole world?
 

Den Duze

Member
It looks like the links are not working anymore...
Can you provide the correct link for the docsets OpenEdge 11.7.2 to be used in Zeal?
 

Keith G.

Member
Asking once again, in the off chance anyone at all is paying attention:
Can the download links be fixed?
Does anyone have newer versions of this docset?
 

Chris Kelleher

Administrator
Staff member
Hello,

If you are using Dash, you can download the OpenEdge documentation sets for 11.5, 11.6 and 11.7 directly from the User Contributed section of the app:

Screen Shot 2021-01-22 at 10.31.00 AM.png


The documentation for 12+ has been completely changed, and I haven't written new scripts to turn that into a docset format yet, but I will give this a try at some point.
 
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