Indicate which arguments are required

[davetron5000]

Might be nice to indicate which arguments are required

[gshutler]

I'm interested in implementing this feature to give something back. Did you have any ideas about how you would like this implemented? Would it be something like:

desc 'Some argument'
arg_name 'some_arg'
required 'You must specify some argument'
flag :arg

The message could be optional. In the help text might it automatically append (required) to the flag/switch message to designate it being required.

Should GLI handle someone not providing a required flag/switch? What behaviour would you like then? Display the help for the command perhaps?

[davetron5000]

Currently, flag arguments are always required even though OptionParser doesn't really require that.

I was mostly referring to command arguments, e.g.

desc 'Complete a task'
arg_name 'task_id'
command :complete do |c|
end

It gets tricky cause GLI just gives an Array to the action block, so you could have something like:

desc 'Complete a task'
# arg name is "task_id" and exactly one is required
args :task_id => :required
command :complete do |c|
end

desc 'Complete a task'
# arg name is "task_id" and one or more are accepted
args :task_id => [:required,:multiple]
command :complete do |c|
end

desc 'Complete a task'
# two args: task_id, which is required and message, which is optional.
# Would then expect to see "todo complete task_id [message]" in the help text
args :task_id => :required, :message => :optional
command :complete do |c|
end

I suppose a minimum viable feature that helps for most cases could be just

arg_name "task_id", :required

That simply requires that at least one arg is provided. That might cover a lot of cases and avoid dealing with the crazy multiple arguments thing.

If you do feel l like working on this (thanks by the way!), Use the gli-2 branch, which is the new "master", and check out test/apps/todo, which is an app created to test more complex stuff like this that's hard to simulate inside a unit test. Check out features/todo.feature for how I'm using it; basically making the todo app use as many GLI features as I can to test them in a real running app.

[gshutler]

Great. That gives me a good idea of what you're looking for.

[sathlan]

Hi,

did someone had time to make some progress on this one?

I'm looking forward to the :multiple flag: to be able to do thing like
this "cmd action -i 1 -i 2 test" and get back something like
this : :-i => [1, 2] in the hash.

It's not yet possible unless I'm missed something.

If nobody has time, I may be able to provide some.

++

[davetron5000]

@sathlan you can currently do what you want via:

flag [:i], :must_match => Array

And then a command-line invocation like

your_app -i 1,2

will give you the value [1,2] for global_options[:i]

I know this isn't exactly what you want, but it's a decent workaround.