Do widgets support introspection?

[Mark Wieder]

On 01/10/2018 09:44 AM, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:

> I can't guarantee there will be a separate file in the future 
> necessarily, nor something human-readable (the manifest.xml is actually 
> generated mechanically from the data in the compiled module file and 
> combined with the metadata statements in the source file).
> 
> However, as has been highlighted here, we do need to add a nice, simple, 
> stable API which returns an array describing a control's public API to 
> the IDE library. There is an API which does it in a form suitable for 
> the property inspector, but that's not quite as succinct.
> 
> So I can guarantee we will add a function 'ideDescribeControl' or some 
> such which would return an array listing the controls properties with 
> full type information and associated metadata so plugins don't have to 
> rely on fettling with internal details.

I'm currently relying on the manifest.xml file in order to retrieve 
information about widgets that seems unavailable elsewhere (distinction 
between widget and library, svgicon data, etc). I'm trying to stay ahead 
of the game by future-proofing my code, and it's a bit frustrating 
trying to guess at things from PR comments. The existing 
revDocsParseDocFileToLibraryArray function in revDocsParser doesn't 
return much useful information about widgets (no metadata, etc).

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com