Best Practices naming conventions
Is there a list anywhere of naming conventions that Captivate uses?
And a best practices list of how to name objects and etc that we create in Captivate?
Clicking Search in Community I’m not coming up with a good clear idea of best practices for naming. I did see v_ for variables. And disliked the suggestion to include the slide number (which can easily change as new slides are added).
As stated from Lieve and Greg, naming conventions tend to be a personal approach mixed with tips picked up from travels in Captivate and programming land.
We created a summary here Pam, enjoy;
Personally, I tend to use names that accurately reflect what a variable or object is used for and where appropriate, use camel casing. Camel casing is when you capitalize the first letter of additional words as you will see in my examples. I stay away from using any symbols or spaces in my naming.
For example, if I need a variable for tracking if all selections are correct, I might use checkCorrect as the variable name.
If I have a button that closes my instruction panel, I might name it closeInstructions and that helps me as I talk through the logic of what I want to happen.
I will also sometimes use a “prefix” or “suffix’ like with varAnswer for a variable or unitsBtn for a button name and other times when I want to just keep things short I may go with something like a1, a2, a3, etc.
No right or wrong answer, really, but you should use something that makes sense to you as you work with them especially if you have to modify somewhere in the future. It sucks to sit scratching your head wondering what a particular variable does when troubleshooting.
The convetion v_ originates in my early blog psots where I used this for variables. At that moment (CP4/5) it was meant to distinguish the user variables from the system variables, because the only way to find one in the dropdown list was using the first character. Meanwhile this has changed, because you can use filtering (unknown by many developers).
However, except for some exceptional situations (like states) the global rule in Captivate is that each item needs to have a unique. I have a personal naming convention, but this is my choice.
Whenever I coach a group training in a company, I suggest the trainees to collaborate in setting up a good naming convention to which everyone agrees.
I have somewhere an old blog about naming. Maybe I should offer some tips in a new blog? Just one: do not use very long names (QSP in the new version are a bad example, names are very long), because in some dropdown lists you’ll see only the first part. From my DOS-past I have kept the routine to make the first 8 characters to be significant.
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