Show Help icon only if [HelpURL] has actually been specified

Unity Engine
1

Unity displays in the Inspector a help icon for every component. It’s this book icon with the ? symbol.

4728713--447806--upload_2019-7-9_17-45-25.png

If you click the help icon, Unity opens a web-browser and opens the corresponding help page for that particular component.

Unless… there has no HelpURL been specified, like in the “Debug Draw Sample 1” Component in the above screenshot.

In this case, Unity tries to open a non-existent page, such as this one. I noticed this with so many Unity components that are provided through packages.

I suggest to display the help icon only, if there has been a HelpURL attribute provided. If it’s missing, either display the icon in an inactive (aka grayed-out) state or hide it entirely.

This prevents users from clicking this icon just to find there exist no documentation. Perhaps it also causes developers to be more aware where those HelpURL attributes are missing.

5 Likes
2

I second this. My team uses the HelpURL attribute for custom components and links to internal confluence documentation pages. However, we couldn’t adopt the principle because in the beginning everyone was starting to click on these icons and reported broken documentation links to me in cases where there’s simply no page for that component. Now nobody wants to use the icon anymore because users don’t know which of them should point to a page.

3 Likes
3

Just running into this annoyance over and over. Please consider to implement my suggestion above. It seems like a trivial fix to me, but has a huge benefit.

2 Likes
4

@Aras Is this perhaps something for your Quality of Life team?

1 Like