Q Light Controller+

Mini rant--->

The vast amount of my time spent correcting fixture definitions involves correcting the Crazy use of Capital LETTERS in channels and Capabilities.

Capital letterS Are for the Start of sentences, names, Headings, words like 'I', and acronyms (eg. DMX).

Words like on, off, strobe, function, gobo, green, yellow, rotation, shutter, sound-Active etc. DO NOT HAVE OR REQUIRE ANY CAPITAL LETTERS. I know the peoplE that Create the DMX PrOfiles for the datasheets LIKE To use capitals like this for some reason but IT looks CraP.

To repeat what's already been said:

1. Please use capitals for all major words for each channel name - 'Pan/Tilt Speed' or 'Gobo Indexing and Rotation' (<- see the lower case 'and' there?). Other examples: 'Dimmer', 'Beam Shaper', 'Special Functions'.
2. For each capability, each function is like a sentence - 'Forwards rotation from slow to fast' or 'Speed from max. to min./Time from 0.2s to 25.5s' (<- notice the capital T for the second use/sentence of the same range?). Other examples: 'Blackout during pan or tilt movement', 'Gobo 6 shake', not 'blackout during Pan or Tilt movement' or 'Gobo 6 Shake'.

I've actual seen things like 'color Wheel' or 'random colour, Fast'. WTF? Does anybody write like this normally?

This moan is mainly for consistency and my OCD so please help me.

Thanks.

Hey robert, welcome to my world

People just don't read things. I have written it a long time ago in the guidelines when I opened this forum section:

Do not write everything in caps. The Fixture Definition Editor will block you to 5 characters anyway

So you have 2 options:
1) when you find crap, don't waste your time and just reply to the author in the forum and hope he will fix it
2) since most of the times #1 doesn't happen and the risk is to loose a complete fixture, then you need to gather all the patience you have and fix it yourself. So basically it's a matter of accepting or not that people don't follow rules
I don't have enough patience and I still keep on refusing to accept people ignorance, so I end up ignoring what I don't like

It is sometimes easier to create a definition from scratch rather than edit a posted one.

I think I may create a parser program that auto-corrects the xml for capitalisation before I even look at it. Will be an interesting project and will remove 80% of the time spent editing submissions - every change also creates the opportunity for error.

Is there a regular expression for READ THE INSTRUCTIONS rather than (([^A-Z]*[A-Z]{,5}[^A-Z]+)*)? Maybe make that comment the default fixture name when someone creates a new one?

Well, we could add some checks in the code to force users to write proper strings.
However, it is tricky to detect each and every specific case. For example:
- acronyms go in caps. Examples: LED, MKII, RGB, CMY, etc..
- measurement units can be mixed. Examples: mS (normally ms), Hz, etc
- some strings require a mix too. Examples: American DJ ProPAR 56RGB, American DJ WiFly EXR Dotz Par, Chauvet COLORpalette, etc

It is not trivial to find some regex to cover all the needs.
Maybe we can start with the capability descriptions ? In your experience, what is the specific area of a definition that wastes most of your time ?

Capabilities: First character - capital letter. First character after a /, capital too.

Channel names: All words above 4 letters have first letter as a capital.

Rather than enforce users to do the above and create problems this would be a great macro type function to automatically do it to the xml (qxfcleaner.exe?).

Getting rid of spurious capitals is the most long-winded part. BLOCK CAPITALS are fine in the fixture name so should be allowed (eg. LED IRC MKII) as you say.

Hard to call...