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Documenting Nodes

Unless you make a throwaway node, adding a short description for it is a good idea. Documentation helps you to recall what the node does and how it behaves in edge cases. If you’re going to publish your nodes as a library, documentation is the must.

Fortunately, describing a node and its pins is a simple process. Writing down a text of couple tweets in length would make your node order of magnitude better than undocumented one.

Let’s document the node between you’ve created while following Creating nodes for XOD in XOD guide.

Describe the patch #

First, we need to describe our between patch as a whole. Open the patch, select nothing. In the Inspector you’ll see the “Description” field. Put a short description there.

Patch description

Describe pins #

Then, we’ll put a short line of description to pins. Select a terminal node for the pin you’re going to document and add a description with Inspector as you did for the patch.

Pin description

Preview the doc #

Select the between node in the Project Browser and press H key to invoke node’s help. This is how the help you just created will look like when others explore what your node does. Nice, isn’t it?

Node help

Note Note, we’ve omitted a description for the OUT pin as its purpose is quite obvious. Try to keep a balance between laconic brevity and details to make your nodes pleasant to work with.

Add patch comments #

Another annotation tool available in XOD is patch comments. They help to understand what’s going on on a patch if one opens it for view or edit.

You can add a comment by hitting “Edit → Insert Comment.” Then drag, resize the comment to the desired position. Double-click to edit its content. When done Ctrl+Enter or click outside the comment to commit.

Comments

Markdown #

Use Markdown formatting if plain text is not enough. In particular:

*stars* to emphasize
`backticks` to refer to pin, node, file names
Blank line to start a new paragraph
Start a line with “* ” for bullet list items
Start a line with “1. ” for ordered list items

Note Although Markdown not supported on every medium your documentation is shown yet, we work on it. Eventually all the docs will render with Markdown formatting.