Comments on: What Do You Do When There Is No Documentation?

By: Matias Lespiau

Matias Lespiau — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:14:16 +0000

I think that going through the api, unit testing, debugging and just asking are all nice solutions for undocumented features.

But, regarind making our own version of the feature is what I think is one of the main problems of lack of documentation.

When we talk about small stuff, usually there’s no problem. But when they are large implementations, this is a problem.

I’ve seen this a lot in open source frameworks, people create their own version of an undocumented feature, either because they didn’t understand it or because of being unaware of it’s existance.

Then people start using this feature/lib, and some members of the community join efforts to improve it. Meanwhile, the core feature grows with other people supporting it. So we end up dividing forces to do the same thing, or worst, our happy contributor is now dissapointed to know that he could have been wasting his time on something else as there is already something that does the same work.

PD: Please excuse the lenght of my comment and any language mistake i could have done.

By: Geoff Ford

Geoff Ford — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 23:10:41 +0000

Simple, you look at the source, step through in a debugger if need be, until you understand what it is doing. Combine that with a quick google search and you can sort 90% of code problems out.

Else you leave it alone and figure something else out, use a better documented third party component or write your own.

By: cakebaker » Usability-driven development

cakebaker » Usability-driven development — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 09:32:41 +0000

[...] the article “What do you do when there is no documentation?” Chris Hartjes wrote about his attempt to use the Auth component in CakePHP for which almost no [...]

By: Tane Piper

Tane Piper — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:43:39 +0000

Doing a Technorati search for “CakePHP” is also a good starting point, as it indexes a lot of good blogs with people putting up their own code snippits, tutorials, explinations, etc.

I have to admit, at first I found it hard to with the lack of any “official” docs – but persevere, looking at the code and API as Chris suggests and you’ll eventually get there.

By: Travis Swicegood

Travis Swicegood — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:24:43 +0000

You could always turn debugging on in your favorite IDE and step through the code that way. When someone reports a bug in SimpleTest (rare as they thankfully are), I’ll setup a test case, tell Komodo to stop before that case starts, then just step through the code one line at a time looking for where my assumptions about what the code should be doing and what it is actually doing differ.

By: Dieter_be

Dieter_be — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:44:37 +0000

I use Google search
if there is something ( _anything_) written about it, you’ll find it on Google search

Else, use the source

By: Tarique Sani

Tarique Sani — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:39:52 +0000

We regularly run the latest code through phpdoc – the result is used as a starting point. However there are places when you are not sure if a feature has been implemented / complete in which case the list or IRC is a great place, thankfully most of CakePHP is written very lucidly

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:07:43 +0000

I look at the API and play around until it works – if it doesn’t I pester the lovely people in #CakePHP

By: Juan

Juan — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 16:21:29 +0000

Read the code, or write my own version

By: Walker Hamilton

Walker Hamilton — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:53:16 +0000

I hop into the source-pool and swim around.

I ran into a pagination issue recently and ended up completely hacking up pagination as a custom private controller method.