Display box examples in the Scripting Guide

[#1]

Hello, I'm one of the writers on the JMP documentation team.

The Scripting Guide contains many examples of how to create display boxes. I’m adding new examples to explain how to create display boxes that are particularly hard to figure out.

Which display boxes do you think are confusing to create and why? What aspects of creating a display box are difficult to remember?

Examples of the troublesome boxes are appreciated. The examples or derivations of them will be used in the doc.

Thanks,

Sheila

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Dear Sheila,

thanks for asking. I have no specific display boxes that are causing me trouble. But I thought I might mention the following as it is close to the topic:

1. I had a lot of troubles whenever I wanted to extract some specific numbers from a report. Since I figured out how to see the whole display tree of the report it became a lot easier but I think the documentation could be improved here.

2. Today I am very familiar with creating UIs in JMP. But at the beginning I was often messing around with the "Dialog" and the "New Window" commands. Especially as the syntax of how to add some display boxes to a dialog is different to the syntax that I need to add the same display box to a "New Window". Maybe it is an option to remove the whole "Dialog"-part from the docu?

3. For all the interactive display boxes (Slider Box, Text Edit Box, ...): It would be great if the examples would show how to extract the values of those boxes. While it complicates the examples a bit it is probably one of the most important things about those boxes. And for my taste this task is not particularly straight forward in JMP.

[#3]

Sebastian, thank you for your response. It's good to hear about areas in the documentation that can be improved.

1. Other users have had the same question about extracting values. Did you find the section of the Scripting Guide in the Display Box chapter called "Extracting Values"? There's also an example in the Common Tasks chapter. The example is based on the Extract Values from Reports.jsl sample script. Let me know if those sections don't answer your questions.

2. Dialog is deprecated now, so the doc will recommend using New Window. In the JMP 12 doc, there's a section in the Display Boxes chapter called "Convert Deprecated Dialog to New Window" that shows the differences between Dialog and New Window.

3. We have some examples of extracting values from interactive display boxes in the "Extracting Values" section. It sounds like we need more of these examples or to make them easier to find.

Sheila

[#4]

Hi Sheila,

thanks for your response. Honestly I know all the answers already because I'm scripting a lot with JMP :-). I just had the feeling that the mentioned points took me longer to grasp than they should have.

Just another question on the topic of extracting values: Let's assume I want to get the R^2 from a Fit Model. Is there no other way than accessing the values via the report and display tree? Coming from an object-oriented-programming background this feels so wired to me. I'm always hoping to one day find the function in JMP that allows me to directly access "attributes" of a plattform-object without going through the tree.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

[#5]

You're right. Going through the tree is the only way to get values from Fit Model.

[#6 · Accepted solution]

One of the things I found confusing when I first started was how to change display tree on the fly, and the answer was to create most of the display tree, but leave hooks in place (display box object variables) that I could append to later on.  So my suggestion would be to reinforce the use of append() and prepend() in some of the example scripts, maybe based on if() statements.

Also, in a JMP training class at the 2014 summit, I think it was Xan that mentioned that prepend is faster than append, so for large display trees or iterations of parameters, it is faster to build the display tree backwards. I haven't tested this out. It's easier for me to think forwards and I've never gotten around to re-writing the scripts that would benefit from this.

Along those lines (not just display boxes) but tips on making scripts run faster would be really appreciated.

I also use the page break feature between parameters' outline boxes so pdf reports look nice. Otherwise the previous parameter's outline box shows up on the subsequent page.

Not sure I actually answered your question, so here another, checkboxes. For some reason I tend to forget that checkboxes can be used as a list, and I tend to use them as 1 box.  So when I want to set a default as "set (n, 1)", it confuses me until I remember that set(1) also works. And also this needs to be placed after the the display tree or within a script of one of the display tree functions (script argument).

[#7]

Thanks for your responses, mjdeez. Good stuff!