Hello Victor and gang:

I have been using Axure RP for several years now and continue to be pleased by the number of features that get added with each release. I'm also amazed by the amount of really interesting feedback that gets put on these forums.

In my current capacity as an Information Architect at Carlson Marketing Canada, I am working towards a strategy where we use Axure as a single-source solution for our IA group, our Business Analysts, and our QA/Testing group.

• We use the  prototype as a conceptual sales tool and validation of interaction, workflow, and general experience.
• We generate several variations of Word2007 documents to target different audiences (client facing, internal, creative, technical)
• We use csv exporting to create worksheets for developers to use for things like page metadata and form validation error messages.

This is all very ambitious, and works ok with a lot of manual intervention. For example, the Word prototypes are still too thin on note formatting to be one-click, so we maintain a master copy and then re-generate working copies as we go to copy & paste into the master.

There are a couple of things that continue to be high on my wish list that would assist a great deal with my goal of using Axure RP as a cross-department prototyping and documentation generating tool:

Formatting page notes - I know that this has been requested a lot - and I know I've been asking for it since early in 2006.  If RP can truly give me one-click ability to generate a robustly formatted specification, it cuts my time considerably. Specifications have come a long way with the release of the API and Word 2007, but the flatness of the page notes continues to be problematic.

Better layout of annotations - the ability to split annotations into multiple tables in specs is great, but better control over annotations that's similar to the views available in the workspace would be fantastic.Since some widgets have very detailed annotations and others don't, the standard hiding mechanisms still result in a lot of empty table cells for annotations.

There are lots of wonderful improvements to the prototyping side of Axure RP, but I think that the potential for the tool as a single source interactive documentation generator is quite good with a little more effort on these features.

 Keep up the great work.

Hi Ian, Thank you for the requests and for describing how you're using Axure.

Formatting page notes is still high on the list. For the layout of annotations, could you describe in more detail or send a sample document to me of the layout that you would like to see. It sounds like you would need a combination of the tables and also a list of widgets with certain annotations fields next to them.

This reminds me - I realised the other day that the two main reasons why I don't use Axure's documentation facilities for anything (other than very light work) is the fact that annotations auto-renumber and that the numbers are not unique within the file.

Automatically re-numbering annotations is - frankly - a show stopper. If I delete an annotated object on the page and the other objects change their numbers then chaos reigns. On a complex project, over time people will refer to annotation numbers in other artefacts outside of my control (eg in emails, PowerPoint decks, spreadsheets, etc.). Similarly, non-unique numbers are rather useless becuase it forces you to add the page name in order to identify them in the abstract.

For the curious, I do my specs by saving my Axure wireframes out as PNGs, then linking these to an MS Word document, where I can annotate them properly. Ironcially, they come out looking very similar to the generated Word specs from Axure!

Hi Victor:

Sorry - super long lag in the reply.

I think the easiest way to describe it is the ability to custom configure the annotation tables output  in the spec the same way you create views in the annotation editor of Axure RP.

I create a table (view) with a title that can then include any set of annotations that exist in my prototype. I can do this multiple times so that I can have a table for form elements, a table for content notes, a table for error messages. This helps me in a few ways:

1. I can now better target the annotations to a document generated for a specific user, for example qa testers may want to vet error messages against the spec, it may want to just know what a form's labels are
2. The tables I create will likely be smaller (fewer columns) and therefore less inclined to look gross.
3. If I have one big document with multiple tables, then it's just more helpful to them to find the annotations of interest to them (sort of like one, but assumes a single spec rather than targeted specs).
   

Thanks. I've just joined up with the google folks at http://groups.google.com/group/amlib

Should be fun.

Hi Ian,

I think I'm still missing something here.

Currently with the 2007 generator, you can configure multiple annotation tables in a single specification with different titles and specify the annotations to include in each table. (In the annotations section of the configure specification dialog, click Add New Table) Could you describe the difference between that functionality and what you are requesting.

Thanks for joining the group!

Hello Victor:

Maybe I'm goofed on skunkweed, but I swear that when I first logged this request, it wasn't working the way I wanted it to. I just remember that the twiddles between hiding unused objects and fields were creating odd tables that duplicated a lot of data or left it out, or something. This will teach me not to check the forum more often (though I don't think the email reminders are working for me).

So, the only remaining thought I have about this is that it would be nice to have an option in the generator to map the 'views' that are created for annotation creation to the generated spec. This could be a single click option that would override the specific annotation selection in favor of generating tables (and titles) based on the Views in the editor.

Sorry for the confusion.

Keep up the good work.

Hi Ian, glad it's working better for you now. Single click to apply the views makes sense. Thank you.

I'm not sure why the email alerts aren't working for you. Maybe try unsubscribing and subscribing to them again?