Saturday 10 July 2021

The CLI GUI Decodes Command Strings

Introduction

Something I've been meaning to add to the CLI GUI for a while is the ability to enter a CLI command string and decode that into a command page with the appropriate parameters set. This would allow someone to understand more about a command without having to run a help command, match to the parameters, and the additional instructions etc defined in the GUI configuration file can be displayed.

I finally got around to adding that capability this week, which wasn't quite as clunky as I was expecting it to be, although to be fair it is still a little clunky.

The Solution

The decoder is offered as part of a new group named 'Built In' - this is so named because it is added to the configured set of commands in the code and will always be present.


Clicking this opens up the command window with a single input to capture the command string:

In this case it's the command I've used in the past to create an org depdendent package, and made sure to write it down for the next time I needed it,

Clicking the Decode Command changes the page to reflect this command, with any additional instructions. And the first clunky bit, in that I always use the short version of the flags so the command generated in this page doesn't match character for character the one pasted in, although it effectively is the same.


The other clunky part is excluding certain functionality from the page when the command is the decoder, but unless I created a whole new page just for that, I was always going to have to do something along those lines. My command configuration file also now knows about the long and short version of every flag, so that it can decode either. 

The Latest Code

I've pushed the latest code to the Github repository - at the moment it's only tested against MacOS as I won't have access to my Windows machine for a day or so. I can't think of any reason why these changes wouldn't work equally well, but if you hit problems before I get a chance to test, raise an issue in the repo.

One thing to bear in mind is that this can only decode the commands and parameters that it knows about. For example, I haven't configured any of the commands to extract data, so there will be no match found when decoding those. 

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Posted by Bob Buzzard at 19:01
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