stopGuides() doesn't work as expected

Mateusz Derks

Updated October 18, 2021 14:03

Hey,

I would like to stop all the guides for a while when we have our own tooltips to display and they should take precedence.

I found it possible to do with `pendo.stopGuides` documented here https://developers.pendo.io/docs/?bash#troubleshooting

The scenario that I end up with is:

1. Open a page with pengo guide displayed
2. Run `pendo.stopGuides()` in the console
3. The guide disappears for a split second but is rendered again

What's the proper way to hide all the guides for some period of time?

Comments

9 comments

Liz Feller
October 18, 2021 14:01

If you want the tooltips to take precedence, why not have the activation for those tooltips be both badge AND automatic, then adjust your guide ordering and throttling so that the tooltips display first?

0
Mateusz Derks
October 18, 2021 14:07 (Edited October 18, 2021 14:08)

Hey Liz Feller thanks for the fast reply!
I just updated the original question to avoid confusion. The tooltips that should be rendered before guides are our own, not rendered by Pendo. As far as I understand we can have activation rules only for resources managed in the admin panel.

If there is any way to tell Pendo about our own UI elements and specify order, that would be super awesome and solve our issue. Please share more details how to do that if it's possible.

0
Liz Feller
October 18, 2021 14:14

ah makes more sense! I don't believe there is a way unless you like bake into each Pendo guide some custom code to look for your built-in tooltips and auto-dismiss the Pendo guides if they are detected? Outside of my understanding of Javascript now ;) but perhaps now's a good time to consider moving your hard-coded tips to Pendo

1
Mateusz Derks
October 18, 2021 14:33

In my current case it's a tooltip and maybe it can be moved to Pendo. However, we can have other elements that users should focus on and don't be distracted by the guides. We will eventually need a way to hide the guides anyway and this `stopGuides` function from JS SDK looked exactly like what would help us. It seems to be currently glitched though.

Other ideas that we considered:
1. Delay pendo initialization until we know it's ok to kick in the guide. Good for some static pages, not for SPA we have.
2. Add a user trait like busy_with_other_stuff: true and filtering all our guides to have it false. A lot of manual work :(

0
Liz Feller
October 18, 2021 14:40

Absolutely! If the Pendo guides don't "have" to be pop-ups, maybe make a mock-Resource-Center (or use the for-real Resource Center) to house them all so they can be accessed on-demand anytime, and not distract from the rest of your content.

0
Mateusz Derks
October 19, 2021 08:57
I made it work with JS SDK like that
```
pendo.setGuidesDisabled(true)
pendo.stopGuides()

pendo.setGuidesDisabled(false)
pendo.startGuides()
```
However `setGuidesDisabled` method is not documented so I don't know if it's an officially recommended way to not.
1
Henry Lewis
November 09, 2021 18:12
We're having the same issue with:
1. Open a page with pengo guide displayed
2. Run `pendo.stopGuides()` in the console
3. The guide disappears for a split second but is rendered again

Mateusz Derks's solution works for us but this seems like a bug with `pendo.stopGuides` and `setGuidesDisabled` is not documented :(
```
pendo.setGuidesDisabled(true)
pendo.stopGuides()

pendo.setGuidesDisabled(false)
pendo.startGuides()
```
0
Howard Lio
November 09, 2021 23:11

Hi Henry Lewis,

Thanks for your comment and sharing with the Community. We are working on updating the API docs to accurately reflect this expected behavior.

You will need to use the function pendo.setGuidesDisabled() to achieve the intended result. Apologies for the confusion and as mentioned, I have passed this onto our product and documentation team to update appropriately.

0
Henry Lewis
November 10, 2021 23:47

Thanks, Howard Lio!

0

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