How to Post Best of a Kind Questions on Developer Community

Article

Evgeny Shvarov · Oct 5, 2017 2m read

#Developer Community Official

Hi, Community Members!

The goal why we are posting questions on Developer Community is to get the answer.

Here is very simple guidelines document on how to ask questions which would get answers.

When you post a question you need to feel 3 fields: title, body, and group. And tags.

1. The Title

A good title should contain the brief description of your problem - it should not be longer than 80-90 symbols.

But brief doesn't mean one word. These are not very good titles for questions: Cache, Ensemble, Peace, World.

Examples of good questions:

Querying a list property with SQL

How to Ignore Headers on a CSV File when Using Record Mapper

$CASE or $SELECT Analog in Cache´SQL

Should you capitalize letters in a title? According to the rules of English - yes. So it would improve the perception of your question definitely.

2. The Body

The body should contain the description of your problem in English or/and Caché Objecsript, SQL, JS or other languages. Use code blocks to highlight Caché ObjectScript.

Providing the version of your product is always helpful (write $zversion in Terminal).

And there should be really ONE question in the body. If you have two questions, please post two different questions.

3. The Group

The group is a mandatory tag which helps to categorize your question to one of InterSystems Products (Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare), Technologies (DeepSee, iKnow) or Services (Online Learning, WRC).

4. Tags

Use tags to invite experts who (subscribed to different tags) to pay attention to your question. Here you can pick different tags regarding development, testing, change management, deployment, and environment.

Good questions usually get answers shortly. You can notice the answered question by green foreground on Answers counter.

And be sure to mark the answer as accepted (to mark the question as solved) of course if the answer suits you.

Of course, this is not the full list of recommendations how to make good questions. Please provide your comments and thoughts in this post.

Mike Kadow · Oct 5, 2017

Evgeny,

Thank you for your post.

However, I still do not understand the difference between Groups and Tags, they seem like saying the same thing in different ways.

1 0

Evgeny Shvarov · Oct 5, 2017

Hi, Mike!

It's a good question.

Now Groups are tags, which we want to be in any post. Every Group tag relates either to InterSystems Product (Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare), or InterSystems Technology (DeepSee, IKnow) or InterSystems Service (Learning Services, Worldwide Response Center (WRC)).

All the rest valuable things are tags. HTH.

0 0

Ok, I guess I will have to take you word for it.

Forgot to mention, that good question should contain only one question in the body.

John Murray · Oct 6, 2017

Another recommendation (for all types of post, not just questions) is to try and make the "teaser" portion of the body useful.

The teaser is the first part of the body, the part that displays under the title on the list of posts that appear on the home page, for example. Sometimes the DC software doesn't make the best job of deciding how much of the body to put into the teaser. For example:

You can help by using this button on the editor to insert the "teaser break" into your text:

The "Preview" button next to the "Save" one is a handy way of checking if a teaser break might be needed. Or, go back to your post and edit it afterwards.

Evgeny Shvarov · Oct 6, 2017

Thank you, John!

I would add that for questions 2-3 sentences long teaser can include the whole question.