Programmatically create UI/cheat sheet to explore snippets

[hhkaos]

Problem

As I mentioned in the Snippet cheatsheet issue. Maintain the table of snippets available manually is:

• It is more time-consuming:
  • Require an additional check on every PR to ensure the entry has been added in the table
  • Require contributors to modify the readme
• Prone to error/inconsistencies:
  • Mismatch between: prefixes and descriptions (table and snippets file)
• Not very usable:
  • The table is not intuitive to explore, even in alphabetical order (other programming cheat sheets group snippets, and use multiple columns). This affect users, but also for maintainers/contributors trying to understand if a code snippet already exists.

This also apply to the one I made with cheatography.com. But I think is worth to have a mechanism that can ensure it is always updated.

Proposal

I think making a web interface should be pretty simple. I have been testing, and I think we can add "custom properties" to the custom snippets:

That, way we could create properties like:

• category: To be able to group snippets (we could consider subcategories if needed; e.g. using a delimitation character)
• url: if we want to add additional hyperlinks on each snippets. For example, we could add to help build an interface which in addition to showing the snippets, also add a link to a reference page:
  • colorVar snippet could point to ColorVariable class - API reference
  • Or a dojoConfig snippet to Configure AMD to load custom modules
  • Or a basemapStyle to Map class - API Reference > Basemap
  • etc.

What do you think? I envision something a simple serverless SPA, like this:

[kellyhutchins]

Sounds awesome!