Suggestions

When providing Custom Commands to .Command, you can also present suggestions to the user on what they can input.

This could be useful when a function can be called with any data, but you want to provide hints to content creators who might not know all the possibilities, it provides a more user friendly interface to .Command.

Improving an existing Command

Suppose our ‘real world’ example has the following class with the following method.

public static class Cheats
{
    [ConsoleCommand(Description = "Damages all enemies of the given type")]
    public static void DamageAllEnemiesOfType(string type)
    {
        if (type == "enemy_type_sausage")
        {
            // Damage all sausages
        }
        if (type == "enemy_type_heroes")
        {
            // Damage all heroes
        }
        if (type == "enemy_type_projectiles")
        {
            // Damage all projectiles
        }
    }
}

The method DamageAllEnemiesOfType takes a type string, but inside the body, we’re expecting certain values. You can provide hints to .Command, so that it can present a friendly user interface.

Using the example above, we know that the data received should be one of the following values “enemy_type_sausage”, “enemy_type_heroes” or “enemy_type_projectiles”. So, let’s present that to the user of .Command.

We firstly need to create a class which implements ISuggestion. Inside this class we want to return a list of suggested data, for example

public class EnemyTypeSuggestion : ISuggestion
{
    public IEnumerable<string> Suggestion(IEnumerable<string> previousArguments)
    {
            var suggestions = previousArguments.ToList();
            suggestions.AddRange( new[] { "enemy_type_sausage", "enemy_type_heroes", "enemy_type_projectiles" } );
            return suggestions;
    }
}

The final step is to tell the ConsoleCommand to use our suggestion, you can do this by adding a parameter Attribute, as shown in the highlighted line.

 public static class Cheats
 {
     [ConsoleCommand(Description = "Damages all enemies of the given type")]
     public static void DamageAllEnemiesOfType([Suggestion(typeof(EnemyTypeSuggestion))]string type)
     {
         if (type == "enemy_type_sausage")
         {
             // Damage all sausages
         }
         if (type == "enemy_type_heroes")
         {
             // Damage all heroes
         }
         if (type == "enemy_type_projectiles")
         {
             // Damage all projectiles
         }
     }
 }

If you press play in Unity and open .Command you should see that it now starts to show you suggestions for your parameter.

Note

It’s possible to add more than one suggestion to a method, in fact you can add one per parameter.