Empty comments not saved during serialization

[jschanker]

Describe the bug

If the comment for a block contains no text (even if pinned), this block state will not be serialized.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to the Blockly Playground,
2. Import the following XML:

<xml xmlns="https://developers.google.com/blockly/xml">
  <block type="text_print" x="100" y="100">
    <comment pinned="true" h="80" w="160"></comment>
  </block>
</xml>

3. Export the XML. Notice that the comment element is removed.

Expected behavior

The empty comment should be serialized.

[BeksOmega]

I think this is actually intentional. The idea being, if the comment doesn't provide any information to the user, you might as well make the save file a tiny bit smaller.

But I'm definitely open to changing this when I do some other serialization work this quarter. Do you have a use case for saving the empty comments?

[jschanker]

That makes sense, and I don't have any practical use case for saving the empty comments. I was just thinking if someone did something like the following to refresh the workspace, the loss of comments might be unexpected:

Blockly.Xml.clearWorkspaceAndLoadFromXml(Blockly.Xml.workspaceToDom(workspace), workspace);

Closing as WAI.

[jschanker]

Just for some context, this is how I refreshed the workspace before I knew about the render method (or before it existed?). I needed it when I used newBlock for converting textual code to blocks to see the new blocks appear. On a tangential note that might be useful for anyone who had forked the Blockly repository a number of years ago before this was necessary, when creating new blocks, initModel or initSvg needs to be called on a block after creating it.