Expose some private functions for printing help #283
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help.go
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| return w.Write(ctx.Stdout) | ||
| } | ||
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| func printApp(w *helpWriter, app *Application) { | ||
| func PrintApp(w *HelpWriter, app *Application) { |
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Is it going to be useful to expose these Print* functions? Unless you want segments in exactly the same format, I'm not sure it will be that useful. WDYT?
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Yeah. I didn't want to flood the public functions but the format of these functions is a bit confusing. My main use case is I want to get the flags output and the arguments output without anything else. Here is the output i'm going for and I would like to get the sections under ARUGMENTS and FLAGS with a function call instead of trying to manipulate the stdout.
─ sq ski:debug:app --help ─╯
USAGE
sq ski:debug:app <app-name> --env <ENV> --region <REGION>
sq ski:debug:app -a <app-name> --env <ENV> --region <REGION>
ARGUMENTS
[<app-arg>]
FLAGS
-h, --help Show context-sensitive help.
--summary
-a, --app=STRING
-e, --env=STRING environment i.e. dev, development, prod, production
-r, --region=STRING region i.e. west, us-west-2, east, us-east-1
SUMMARY
Run an automatic debug on an application that will help highlight common/known issues.
SUPPORT
Ask in #kubernetes
Note the USAGE, SUMMARY, and SUPPORT sections are static strings created by engineers.
Ideally, i could just call WritePositionals and WriteFlagsForCommand to a string writer get the output i want and plug it in where i need.
help.go
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| @@ -174,24 +174,8 @@ func printNodeDetail(w *helpWriter, node *Node, hide bool) { | |||
| w.Print("Arguments:") | |||
| writePositionals(w.Indent(), node.Positional) | |||
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writePositionals -> PrintPositionals?
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I went in the opposite direction since it made more sense to me. Print -> Write for the new public funcs since it writes to WriteHelper but i can switch to print if you want.
help.go
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| } | ||
| } | ||
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| func writeCommandList(cmds []*Node, iw *helpWriter) { | ||
| func writeCommandList(cmds []*Node, iw *HelpWriter) { |
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I think if some of these functions are exposed, they probably all should be no?
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I was avoiding this to prevent too many public functions but i went ahead and added these too.
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Overall LGTM, but let's move it into a separate package, perhaps |
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Ping on last comment? |
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Sorry been a little distracted and am current in India for a few weeks. I'll get around to this in May. Feel free to take charge of the PR if you want to make this happen sooner. |
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All good, no hurry :) |
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So, i tried to split apart the code but it doesn't really work nicely. For example, HelpWriter depends on Flag, HelpValueFormatter, HelpOptions, Node, and Positional but there isn't really an easy way to avoid a circular dependency without breaking changes. If i move these structs into a shared types package, it would be a breaking change. I could add interfaces that return each value HelpWriter needs via a method call and then add the methods to the objects but that is pretty ugly imo. Do you want me to go down the interfaces route or would you rather leave this as is? |
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One alternative thing i can try to do is to make the WriteX functions into methods so |
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I did what i was saying above with making functions into methods and pushed the code. LMK if you like it and hopefully the linter passes. 🤞 |
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Hi, is this PR still alive? This would be nice to have and to be able print help when needed without resorting to workaround #33 . |
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Closing because I think help extensibility needs some careful thought, before exposing internal implementation details. |
I'm building a cli tool with some custom help output but want it to look similar to the default help output. It would be nice if these private functions were exposed so it's easier to use these help functions to build something custom. This PR doesn't change any functionality and is purely for exposing private functions.
Please feel free to edit or let me know what to change. I can also extract these to a separate package if that is more desirable.
P.S. Thanks for building and maintaining this awesome library. 🙏