Copyright © 2000 by Object Tools <info@object-tools.com>
Visual Eiffel™ API documentation is a part of the Visual Eiffel™ installation and comes in a ready-to-use HTML format. Usually there is no need for the user to generate the documentation from the scratch. However, it might be useful when there are third-party clusters, not included in the standard Visual Eiffel™ installation, when the user wants to customize the generated HTML or when there is a need to obtain a plain XML for other needs.
The generation is based on the possibility of the Visual Eiffel™ to output some information in the XML format. The latter can be converted to the HTML using XSL transformations (XSLT).
All necessary files are located in the folder $VE_Bin/apidoc. They are listed in the table below.
Table 1. Distribution contents
File mask | Purpose and content |
---|---|
makefile, *.make | Makefiles that drive the generation process |
*.beg, *.end, *.src | Sources of some output files |
*.xsl | XSLT scripts to convert API documentation from XML format into HTML format as well as in the intermediate text format |
To start generation the following requirements should be met:
All the requirements to produce XML using the Visual Eiffel™ compiler should be met. As to the moment of writing, these include
JDK 1.2.2 or the corresponding JRE
Java™ DOM Level 1 package, such as xerces from http://xml.apache.org/
Properly set CLASSPATH environment variable (it should include DOM Level 1 package, e.g. xerces.jar)
XSLT utility, such as xt from http://www.jclark.com/
Make utility, such as NMAKE
The generation was tested with the following software: JDK 1.2.2, xerces 1.1.2, XT, NMAKE 1.61.
The following steps describe the generation process:
Run the make utility:
NMAKE html
The table below lists the targets that could be specified for the make utility.
Table 2. Targets
Target name | Purpose |
---|---|
help | This is a default target. It asks you to specify one of the "real" targets |
clean-all | Removes all the generated files |
html | Produces full documentation in HTML format |
xml | Produces full documentation for all clusters in XML format. It's not useful for online viewing, only as an input for some other utility |