JavaDoc Doclet for DocFX

This doclet is designed to produce a YAML representation of the Javadoc-generated documentation, that can be integrated into DocFX.

Please Notice: This default branch supports DocFX V2 only.

If you are using DocFX V3, please check further in main branch.

Getting started

The easiest way is to just get the JAR files directly from our Release for June, 2020. Supports DocFX V2 .

Alternatively, you can clone the repository and build it with the help of Maven. You can do so by calling:

mvn compile

Once the compilation is complete, you will need to generate a JAR file, that can be used alongside javadoc. You can do so by calling:

mvn package

This will produce two JAR files that you can use - one with dependencies, and another one without.

Usage

With maven-javadoc-plugin

When there is an existing java project where Maven is used as a build tool, one could add maven-javadoc-plugin to the root pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>3.0.1</version>
  <configuration>
    <doclet>com.microsoft.doclet.DocFxDoclet</doclet>
    <docletArtifact>
      <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
      <artifactId>${project.artifactId}</artifactId>
      <version>${project.version}</version>
    </docletArtifact>
    <useStandardDocletOptions>false</useStandardDocletOptions>
    <additionalOptions>-outputpath ./generated-files</additionalOptions>
    <!-- Add additional options here when needed -->
  </configuration>
</plugin>

The doclet can then be ran with the following command:

mvn javadoc:javadoc

The generated files will be placed in the ./target/site/apidocs/generated-files folder

Usage of doclet with Gradle javadoc task

For Gradle project put jar with doclet to libs folder and add next task to build.gradle:

task generateApiDocs(type: Javadoc) {
  source sourceSets.main.allJava
  classpath = configurations.runtimeClasspath
  options.encoding 'UTF-8'
  destinationDir = file("build/generated-files")
  options.addStringOption("doclet", "com.microsoft.doclet.DocFxDoclet")
  options.docletpath = [file("libs/docfx-doclet-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar")]
  dependsOn build
}

fix for gradle sending invalid arguments to doclet resulting in invalid arguments -notimestamp and -notitle gradle/gradle#11898

And run doclet using next command: gradle generateApiDocs
In result generated files will be placed into ./build/generated-files folder

Standalone

One can execute the javadoc command with the command line parameters:

javadoc \
-encoding UTF-8 \
-docletpath ./target/docfx-doclet-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar \
-doclet com.microsoft.doclet.DocFxDoclet \
-classpath <list of jar with dependencies> \
-sourcepath ./src/test/java \
-outputpath ./target/test-out \
-excludepackages com\.msdn\..*:com\.ms\.news\..*  \
-excludeclasses .*SomeClass:com\.ms\..*AnyClass \
-subpackages com.microsoft.samples

Parameter	Description
encoding	Encoding for source files (optional).
docletpath	Path to the doclet JAR file.
doclet	Doclet class name.
classpath	List of dependencies to be included in the classpath (optional).
sourcepath	Location of the source code that needs to be documented.
outputpath	The location for the generated YAML files.
excludepackages	List of excluded packages, separated by a colon (:) (optional).
excludeclasses	List of excluded classes, separated by a colon (:) (optional).
subpackages	Subpackages to recursively load, separated by a colon (:).

For example, if we would want to generate documentation for JUnit-4.12 source code, we would need to account for the fact that the library depends on hamcrest-core-1.3, therefore we would download this library, unpack the sources JAR and run the following command:

javadoc \
-encoding UTF-8 \                                     # Source files encoding
-docletpath ./docfx-doclet-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar \     # Set path to jar with doclet
-doclet com.microsoft.doclet.DocFxDoclet \            # Set name of doclet class
-cp ./hamcrest-core-1.3.jar \                         # Put dependencies into classpath
-sourcepath ./junit-4.12-sources \                    # Set localtion of jar with sources 
-outputpath ./test-out \                              # Set location of output files
-subpackages org:junit                                # Subpackages to recursively load separated by ':'

You can take a look at an example documentation generation script outlining the process above.

Development

When making changes, it is important to ensure that you are using DocletRunner class - it is responsible for makeing the javadoc call and takes params from an external configuration file.

To use it:

• Create Run/Debug IDE configuration with the main class set as com.microsoft.doclet.DocletRunner
• Add src\test\resources\test-doclet-params.txt as program arguments of configuration

Now we could run/debug doclet against source code classes located in the com.microsoft.samples package, as specified in the test-doclet-params.txt config file.

Serving DocFx documentation

1. Get DocFX. You can read about it on the official site.
2. Initialize an empty docset, by calling: docfx init -q
3. Place the generated YAML files in the api folder in the generated docset.
4. Build the content in the folder by calling: docfx
5. Serve the content on a local web server: docfx serve _site