On 12/11/23 15:29, Christof Ressi wrote:
Ok, I have a come up with the following solution: I moved the multichannel section into a dedicated patch and open it with [;pd open <name> <dir> 1( when the user clicks a bang button in the main help patch. It's not perfect, but kind of works for my purposes.
so the user only gets the error if they click on the bang? hmm.
I am still wondering if anyone has run into the same issue and found other solutions.
i don't, but here's my thoughts:
- i think class_sethelpsymbol() is evil in practically all cases (that
do not deal with names that cannot be represented as filenames; and even these cases some hexmunging might be a better solution than class_sethelpsymbol())
- personally i wouldn't care to much about error messages in help
patches (as in: going through hoops in order to avoid them). since in this case you control the actual error message make sure that it is friendly enough (e.g. just telling people that they will need a newer version of Pd in order to use this cool feature) - i strongly believe that we can expect people to actually read and understand an error message (and not just seek help just because "lines were red"). it's not that Pd's error messages are very obtrusive)
if you absolutely insist on not having error messages and do not share my aversion against class_sethelpsymbol() you could create two help patches and in the multichannel version *only* document the multichannel features and include the non-multichannel help patch as an ordinary object (probably with some "auto open" code. that way you wouldn't have to duplicate the common documentation.
mhdgs IOhannes