Talk:Property tree
Major revamp for Property Tree articles
Hi,
This evening I've renamed and merged the articles about the Property Tree made by Ac001 this morning and some other users over the last year(s). As we all know the Property Tree has an unlimited length, so trying to put (documentation of) the tree in a wiki isn't that easy at all ;)
I don't say we are there yet, however I hope that we made a step towards the right direction.
MILTSD, you posted some good comments, I will take a closer look at them to see where we can merge all of the ideas. Please post further comments/ideas that come up in your (and others) head. Everything is welcome.
Regards,
Gijs 13:12, 9 September 2009 (EDT)
TODO
- new page: Property
To add
Setting a property that does not exist in the property tree creates it. This gives you the ability to create your own properties in the FlightGear property tree just by bringing them into existence in your NASAL scripts or XML files.
Suggestion
I've been looking at the README.protocol which is here:
http://cvs.flightgear.org/viewvc/source/docs-mini/README.properties?view=markup
This seems to be broken down into two main areas as follows
- Controls
- Flight Controls
- Engines
- Fuel
- Gear
- Anti-Ice
- Hydraulics
- Electric
- .. etc
- FDM (Aircraft Settings)
- Position
- Orientation
- Velocities
- Engines
- Common
- Piston
- .. etc
- Light
- Umm?
So that structure is nice and clear to me anyway about where the target property should be.
So the suggested format based on the above would be covering each node. with a brief description Having the nodes in plain text format (for cut and paste), and then a more detailed notes below. Also the nested tructure would make it nice with the navigation
for example
- As previously mentioned, it would be far better to collect all this information in a separate article, something along the lines of Property Tree Reference, this would be directly targeted at contributors wishing to deal with the property tree in order to help them look up property names and purposes. In addition, it's probably worth pointing out that you don't have to come up with these properties manually, you can have FlightGear create a dump for you at runtime, either by using nasal or the built-in GUI wrapper provided by the property browser (see for example [1]:"and the third addition is a value dump function: if you Shift-click on the '.' entry, then you get a dump to the terminal of all values."). Also, it's probably a good idea to differentiate between system-wide properties that are aircraft and session-agnostic and those ones that are specific to certain (types of) aircraft. However, in the long run, maintaining such a reference on the wiki may become tedious given that properties can be simply made up and renamed arbitrarily by aircraft developers/contributors, encouraging or even requiring contributors to introduce new properties with a corresponding "description" attribute would be far better given that this information would also be available at runtime (within the simulation), so that it could for example be used to dynamically display tooltip-like interactive help to describe the purpose of a property (see Recommended_Property_Tree_Enhancements#Suggested_new_attributes_in_PropertyList_XML_files or Recommended_Project_Policies#Node_Descriptions_.26_Comments). In addition, Nasal scripts could for example even write out such references to a text or even PDF file easily.--MILSTD 08:20, 8 September 2009 (EDT)
Links
- Maybe this page should be in the navigation also
Howto:Working_with_the_Property_Tree_API
- and maybe a link on the intro page to Property_browser
ac001 14:38, 9 September 2009 (EDT)