BLOCK minimize and deactivate capability

[Turgut Guneysu]

Hi John

I’ve been working with rather lengthy block sequences and they take up a lot of space on the coding area. Is it possible to minimize designated block sequences until EDITING is required, probably just showing the first block ?

Also along the same line of thinking, App Inventor has a feature where for debugging purposes any block can be clicked on and DEACTIVATE selected from a dropdown menu. It is very useful while testing code. Color turns light grey and any execution skips it.

Thanks

[John Maloney]

You can hide a block definition by selecting “hide block definition” in the purple hat block at thte top of its definition. This removes the definition from the scripting area but does not delete the definition from the system. The block can still be called and still appears in the palette, either in the “My Blocks” palette or in the library where the block was defined.

To show a block definition, right-click the block in the palette and select “show block definition” from the menu. You can use this technique to see the definitions of blocks in libraries so you can explore how they work.

As a shortcut for hiding a block definition, you can also just drag the definition to the palette. That’s the same as selecting “hide block definition.”

If you want to permanently delete the block definition, select “delete block definition”. That removes the block definition entirely, not just from the scripting area, but from the project altogether. After deleting the block definition, the block will disappear from the palette and you won’t be able to call it anymore.

The MicroBlocks (and Scratch) equivalent of the App Inventor “disable” feature is to simply disconnect the hat block from the blocks under it. I’m not sure if that technique is possible in AppInventor – do projects retain unconnected blocks when the project saved? If not, that may have motivated adding the disable feature in App Inventor.