Sparx Systems Forum

Enterprise Architect => Suggestions and Requests => Topic started by: Antoine Atallah on October 12, 2006, 03:46:31 pm

Title: Request support for Doxygen Comments
Post by: Antoine Atallah on October 12, 2006, 03:46:31 pm

Hi,

It would be really useful if EA would understand/generate Doxygen comments.

Right now, if i write my own comments, and synchronize, the comments get all mixed-up. I tried changing to JavaDoc style, but still, it is not really great.

I believe this would help anbody using Doxygen to generate their documentation from their comments.

Thanks!

Antoine

Title: Re: Request support for Doxygen Comments
Post by: «Midnight» on October 13, 2006, 04:32:14 am

Search the forum for this. There has been quite a bit of discussion.

Title: Re: Request support for Doxygen Comments
Post by: jmccabe on October 02, 2007, 12:43:37 am

FWIW - despite additional discussion on doxygen earlier this year that can be found in the forum, EA still doesn't support Doxygen style comments on C++ code generation.

I've recently changed jobs and, in both this job and my previous job, we have been using Doxygen and Enterprise Architect and struggling with using them together.

I'm sure there are loads of other companies out there in this position that are probably just living with it, but the ability to maintain this sort of information in EA and to output it in a format that can be understood by another tool is very powerful.

Obviously EA can output in JavaDoc and XML.NET format, but I would imagine many people who choose to use Doxygen are not working with Microsoft tools so the XML.NET format is not appropriate, and JavaDoc outputs C-style comments which, in C++ (in my opinion) are also not appropriate.

Please Sparx, let's have full Doxygen support for C++ code generation and reverse engineering.

Thanks.
John

Title: Re: Request support for Doxygen Comments
Post by: andymc73 on October 07, 2007, 08:30:29 pm

I set up my code engineering to forward engineer only, and that C++ comments get replaced. Basically I took the Doxygen template from the Wiki and made it work how I wanted after a lot of head bashing

This implies the following:

* All element documentation goes in the model
* For extra doco, put the inline Doxygen comment after the curly brace at the start of the C++ method, so it doesnt get clobbered in the forward engineering

Pros:

- I can add non-core variables and methods to my C++ classes in the code without cluttering the model
- Core variables and methods are documented in the model and the Doxygen (we have tools that scan the XMI to report which items are undocumented)

Cons:

- Renaming a method or member leaves the old method in the C++
- ordering generally doesnt stay nice and neat in the generated source
- It cant update the FILE header comment, only class and method
- it cant do Doxygen comments on the line before member fields, they have to be inline after ( the ///< style) because the Code generator otherwise gets very badly confused

It would be much nicer if the synchronizer worked properly though...

HTH