CC Open Source Blog

Enumeration descriptions in CC Web Services

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by nathan on 2009-04-02

We had a request come in from a developer using the CC web services for better contextual information about the choices users make when selecting a license. In particular, they wanted to present users with information about what "ShareAlike" means. As I dug into it I realized that the existing <description> we provided for the questions themselves are... well, bad. I can only imagine how hard it'd be to craft a user interface using those as help text.

I just pushed an update to the development version of the API that adds <description> elements to the individual <enum> elements. These map to the help pop-ups we use on the main license chooser. If all seems well we'll push this down to 1.5 as well.

I should also note that this update includes two new, very nice (for me) improvements: