Web-Based IDE Improvements

We are prioritizing features and fixes to put into place for the IDE and development tools in general. I would like to use this topic to help us with that. I will fill in some suggestions I have already received but fee free to chime in here.

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Lower priority… but access to the default images that SmartThings uses for some of their apps would be great. And the ability to add our own images for App (or can we do that already? Never tried…)

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My requests in no particular order:

-Ability to see variables in a side panel during simulation (this would remove 99% of log.debug lines in code)
-Side window API reference / documentation. A fly out window that would contain all the relevant commands, help info, overrides etc. Double click on function name, it drops it into code at current cursor
-Better SmartApp simulation, identical to iOS / Android App enviornment. Right now impossible to test OAUTH based SmartApps in simulator
-Default values in devicetypes actually work in Simulator / IDE
-Ability to browse sample / community code outside of a smartap or devicetype
-Github integration
-Ability to sort and search shared code samples
-Ability to share devicetypes along with smartapps
-Ability to link a devicetype to a specific smartapps, or the ability to contain a devicetype definition inside a smartapp for creating child devices.
-Move SmartApp simluator devices to a bottom horizontally scrollable row, which would make room for other vertical windows.
-Code autocomplete, or at least a code validation option.
-IDE view of scheduled events (copy from hub->smartapps list->smartapp info)
-Common function storage, shouldn’t need 100 copies of convertIpToHex, or other missing features
-Better warning if a log.debug is too long to display, right now it doesn’t do anything, displays nothing.
-Regex.match support

That’s all I can think of right now, I’m sure there is more…

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Here’s my wishlist.

  • GitHub
  • Ability to search shared code
  • Defaut Values in Sim
  • Better mobile view
  • Linking to apps i share, so when i have an app that works for someone on the IDE already i can link to it.
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You can already do this. Just change the icon URL to any URL that you want to use.

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Would be nice to have an easier way to browse the most recent SmartApps.

Unless I’m missing it (and I miss a lot), you need to click “My SmartApps”, either create a new SmartApp or edit an existing SmartApp, and then the option to browse appears in the upper right corner.

Also the ability to search shared SmartApps would be great.

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Yeah, but an image browser inside the ide would be nice… There is one in the docs and someone put up a website with all of them, I don’t remember the link but found it in the search on here.

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Agreed

10 chars :smiley:

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  • Be able to enter device configuration in the simulator.
  • If there is a bug in the code, don’t crush the simulator.
  • Schedules to continue working (right now, the scheduled tasks die eventually).
  • When scheduled task crashes, show the error message in the log. Right now there’s nothing in the log.
  • Line numbers in the stack trace to correspond with the actual numbers in the code. This is not always working.
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Number one on my list would be to get this one fixed. Also +1 on a variable watcher. I would also like to see some popups for inserting syntax templates.

Alphabetical order of shared smart apps. Also make a description of the shared smart apps a requirement so that people browsing have a better idea of what some are.

This is all really good stuff. Inviting a few people to the conversation: @bflorian and @rappleg

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Control of Devices through the IDE. I know i can do this through the sim but sometimes i need to use my phone to setup a scenario for testing and it would be cool to do this through the IDE.

Not really IDE-specific, but:

  • Location-wide “state” variables, so that we don’t have to use dummy switches to coordinate across multiple SmartApps and/or SmartDevices in the same locale.
  • a non-blocking delay() or sleep() function for use within devices that require polling to update status
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I would imagine this would be more of a web-based interface to SmartThings - AKA My SmartThings. Not truly an IDE thing but more consumer facing. Totally planned - though still far from implemented.

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Agreed, i was thinking something along the lines of a page that looked like the Example OAuth screen. thats wha ti currently use to do this, would be nice to have it all in one location though :smile:

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I’ve like improvements in the IDE soft serve ice cream dispenser. Right now half the time it doesn’t even work, and more often than not, it’s out of vanilla.

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+1 on that! It’s be nice to be able to drop a link into a forum post.

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So true, i mean… how hard is it to make sure they have vanilla? #vanillamovement

I agree with all of these suggestion and would like to add the addition of being able to keep code snippets.

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