Select Prompt

1. Message and choices
2. No name needed
3. Features array
4. Conventional default answer

Message and choices

The first select prompt in makesjs/demo2 questions.js:

module.exports = [
  // ...
  {
    message: 'What type of project?',
    choices: [
      {value: 'nodejs', title: 'Node.js'},
      {value: 'ruby', title: 'Ruby'}
    ]
  }
  // ...
];

Same as text prompt, you need to provide a message for user to read, plus a list of choices. Every choice can have:

1. value: (optional) a string value, invisible to end user.
   • you can only use letters, numbers, and dash(-) in value string.
   • underscore(_) is not permitted, because it’s a char to be used in condition expression part of file/folder name. We will explain in conditional file.
2. title: what end user will read on screen.
3. hint: (optional) additional explanation for end user to read on screen.

Example of choices with hints:

module.exports = [
  // ...
  {
    message: 'What type of project?',
    choices: [
      {value: 'nodejs', title: 'Node.js', hint: 'Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome\'s V8 JavaScript engine.'},
      {value: 'ruby', title: 'Ruby', hint: 'A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity.'}
    ]
  }
  // ...
];

No name needed

Different from all popular prompts, inquirer, enquirer, and prompts, our select prompt doesn’t need name.

While other popular select prompt returns an object like:

{ "name-of-the-select": "selected-value" }

We simply return "selected-value" or undefined (if user selected a choice with no value).

Features array

All answers from select/multi-select prompt questions are merged together into an array internally called features. For example, when end user selected nodejs and babel from two different select prompts, the features array becomes:

['nodejs', 'babel']

If end user selected a choice with no value or a value of empty string, “makes” will not add anything into the features array.

This simplification means all non-empty choice values among all select/multi-select prompts must be unique.

The features array is essential to conditional question/choice/file/content, which we will explain in related topics.

Conventional default answer

Select prompt doesn’t support default. For simplicity, the default answer of a select prompt is always the value of first available (after conditional filtering) choice. If there is no value on first available choice, the default value is undefined.