buildingSMART / buildingSMART/IFC4.x-development
Show enumerations as human names alongside STEP ALLCAPS for better accessibility to users
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 234
- Forks
- 123
- Avg merge
- 15h 4m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 5
Description
Emma Hooper suggests that showing ALLCAPS for enumerations is not user-friendly. It's great for devs, but probably not for users getting into the world of IFC.
Edit: original thread https://twitter.com/liccle_em/status/1498821805271928834
Not a high priority for the ISO deadline, but thought I'd record it nonetheless as in theory it could be an easy fix.
Option 1) The harder solution, but potentially useful is to actually store a human name in UML, which can then be translated into other languages too. Maybe this already exists but I didn't notice in the XMI file.
Option 2) The easy solution, is to simply check markdown headers as the human name (e.g. "User-Defined") then canonicalised into "USERDEFINED" when correlating with the UML. If the markdown header == the UML enum literal, then a titlecase is auto applied, which gives a pretty good result for 90% of the enums out there which are single words. We actually already do something similar to this for concept usages.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start by tracing how Markdown headers are correlated with UML/XMI enumeration literals, then inspect the existing concept-usage handling mentioned in the issue. The change is complete when enum values retain their canonical STEP ALLCAPS representation while also displaying a human-readable name, without losing the proposed translation path.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- markdown, python, xml
- Domain
- documentation
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100