I would appreciate a way to click F2 to open a popup window with a text editor for the analysis expression variables.
It's very difficult to work with the current setup. After having done range checks and bad value checks on the input attributes, you've used the few visible lines and it starts becoming a mess when doing the actual expression logics.
I've attached a screenshot to demonstrate!
Considering all the modern IDEs that exist for just about any coding language in existence, this has to be one of the largest deficits of the OSI PI Asset Framework offering in terms of developer experience.
Having the ability to open an analysis or group of analysis into something that is akin to (Sublime Text, Atom, Notepad++,VIM, emacs w.e) type text editor would greatly improve the experience of every engineer and developer.
The ultimate experience would be something like just having a text editor with a directory of your various analysis. Almost like if System Explorer had a separate portal to only managing and developing analyses. But instead of being locked in that portal it opened a separate space where we can still view the hierarchy of our assets and still browse around ect.
Resizing windows isn't enough but it would be a massive improvement.
If you have come across this feedback post via google search. As a potential work around while this is implemented here is what you can do.
Download Notepad++ and load in this user defined language. I made this because I got so frustrated using system explorer to write functions.
I scraped all the expression Keywords and created a style guide that is very similar to what is used in PI System explorer. I created an extension called ".pse" so if you load ".pse" these are really just plain text files, into notepad++ with this UDL you will at least be able to leverage a nice text editor.
You can now copy and paste the code into PI System Explorer, IMO this is bad development practice but if like me you can't stand only having 2 inches to code in this should work.
Lastly there are plenty of videos / tutorials out there on how to create your own notepad++ style guides so if you don't like this one have at it.
Edit: The forums will not let me attach the .XML file to the forum post I have uploaded it as a text file in the above post.
