Persistent User Comments

General Discussion
#1

I have been asked to create a user experience where a user can customize a product (change product, textures, and/or materials) as well as create persistent comments. I was looking at using ZapWorks Studio and WebAR for this. On the customization side there are plenty of tutorials and examples, but I was wondering if there was any guidance or examples of creating persistent comments accessible to any viewer that comes to the experience after a comment is saved. I would like to gather additional information on using a textbox or form to create and save a comment with an icon that a future viewer could press to see the comment and possibly expand upon. Then the question becomes how to save and retrieve the comments.

Thank you for any help on guidance on this,
-Eric

#2

Hi Eric,

Great question. I actually answered this question during one of our recent live Q&A sessions. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBhQZzUJuZY (skip to around 4 mins).

The link to the persistent data docs can be found here: https://docs.zap.works/studio/scripting/examples/storing-persistent-data/

Prompting the user for a text input requires Z.prompt: https://docs.zap.works/studio/scripting/reference/prompt/constructor/prompt/
https://docs.zap.works/studio/scripting/examples/getting-keyboard-input/

Hope this helps and let me know if you would like me to clarify anything.

George

#3

Thank you for the response George, it looks like the requirements for this project have changed. I will let you know if I get a chance to test this out in another project.

-Eric

#4

Hi @George
I checked your video (exact moment: https://youtu.be/IBhQZzUJuZY?t=360) and I wish if you can develop a little bit more on these:

  • @eric.craft mentioned “…a future viewer could press to see the comment and possibly expand upon”. That means another device. That would be amazing, even for making social your marketing: userA makes a comment which is stored; and later userB in his own device retrieves that comment with the possibility to add to it. However, the documentation mentions “It’s possible to store a small amount of data on the user’s device that can be retrieved between different views of the same code.” That sounds like a single user feature.

  • In any case I am more interested on your comment that, "a little bit more difficult but you can also store the data online on a database or any given place you like, as long it is supported, and then you can retrieve that [persistent data] each time… within the ZapApp". My questions are:

    • Would this work also for WebAR with Studio?
    • Could you please write an example of the scripting?
    • Which databases do you suggest?

By the way, I’m just a beginner developer :see_no_evil:
Thanks!