Visual Eiffel API documentation generation

Last modified: 10.10.00 17:02

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Distribution
2. Requirements
3. Generation
3.1. Invocation
3.2. Targets

1. Introduction

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).


1.1. Distribution

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

2. Requirements

To start generation the following requirements should be met:

The generation was tested with the following software: JDK 1.2.2, xerces 1.1.2, XT, NMAKE 1.61.


3. Generation

3.1. Invocation

The following steps describe the generation process:

  1. Copy all the files from the Distribution into the folder where the documentation should be produced.
  2. Ensure that the clusters listed in the makefile are in the Visual Eiffel repository; remove unnecessary clusters from the makefile or add required clusters in the Visual Eiffel repository.
  3. Run the make utility:

    NMAKE html
    

3.2. Targets

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