Open documentation through plugins

Feature Requests Studio Features
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#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to open documentation through plugins. In the past we were able to use plugin:OpenWikiPage() but with the introduction of the new documentation page this API has not only lost is entire functionality but is also severely outdated in documentation despite not being marked as depricated.

After searching for alternatives/proper usage of this API i came across a post where staff mentioned making a new feature request for something alike to this function, and many more people requesting/wondering how to achieve these sorts of things nowadays.

The problem currently arising is that I cannot point towards documentation in an easily accessible way through plugins from what it used to, other than telling people to just go visit a certain page. This is not ideal, and especially not user friendly.

I wish to point to certain API documentations for users to more better understand what properties, that may not entirely speak for themselves within a plugin, mean or to generally give more of an ease of access to more full information of said class/method, etc.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would take away the need for me to need to explain in detail each and every reference applicable by simply including an interactive method in opening docmentation

4 Likes
#2

Including use concrete cases would be helpful here.

For example, if you want to include documentation for your game / plugin an API pointing at the creator hub won’t help you because you can’t put arbitrary documentation there.

1 Like
#3

api-reference/class/BasePart
it will actually still work its just the sample code on the docs is outdated

#4

But what’s the use case? Why do you want to link to the BasePart documentation?

#5

It’s just an example. That’s just the way the link is formatted dude. I wasn’t trying to link to the base part just giving an example

#6

Ah, thought you were replying to my previous reply.

1 Like
#7

my bad for not responding, i thought i did but forgot to actually post it.
The plugins im making utilize certain aspects of the roblox API (like raycasting, unwrapping sub elements on properties like position/rotation inside of CFrame, etc) in a user-friendly fashion interface wise. being able to link back to documentation for users to see what it actually entails would be neat without me having to scrape the webpage through a proxy and make a wrapper myself to display it or alternatively to need to write such documentation out myself as i can just link back to the API webpage which is a 1:1 anyway of the usage.

1 Like
#8

Roblox documentation is hosted on a GitHub repository in YAML for reference files and MD for everything else. The only problem I see is loading in images and pulling the code samples (since these aren’t open source).

Still support this though.

1 Like
#9

I just came across a case where this would be seriously useful to my audio plugin.

I have a “help” button available for all the audio instances, which opens the following modal:

Screenshot 2024-10-16 at 9.21.59 PM

It would be very convenient if the user could simply click on a “View in Docs” button to immediately get the most detailed API reference available for that instance.