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OODoc-0.03
River stage zero No dependents
1 ++
/ OODoc

NAME

OODoc - object oriented production of code documentation

INHERITANCE

 OODoc
   is a OODoc::Object

SYNOPSIS

 use OODoc;
 my $doc = OODoc->new(files => \@files);

 use OODoc::POD;
 my $pod = OODoc::POD->new(...);
 $pod->produce($doc);

DESCRIPTION

OODoc stands for "Object Oriented Documentation". The OO part refers to two things: this module simplifies writing documentation for Object Oriented programs, and at the same time, it is Object Oriented itself: easily extensible.

METHODS

Attributes

$obj->module

    Returns the nice name for the module.

$obj->version

    Returns the version string for the module.

Parser

$obj->processFiles(OPTIONS)

     Option    Defined in       Default                     
 manifest                   'MANIFEST'                  
 parser                     'OODoc::Parser::ExtendedPOD'
 select                     qr/\.(pod|pm)$/             
 verbose                    <from object>               
 workdir                    <from object>

    . manifest FILENAME

      The manifest file lists all files which belong to this module: packages, pods, tests, etc.

    . parser CLASS|OBJECT

      The parser CLASS or OBJECT to be used to process the pages.

    . select ARRAY|REGEX|CODE

      The files which contain documentation to be processed. You can provide a list of filenames as array reference, a REGEX which is used to select names from the manifest file, or a CODE reference which is used to select elements from the manifest (filename passed as first argument). Is your pod real pod or should it also be passed through the parser?

    . verbose INTEGER

      Tell more about each stage of the processing. The higher the number, the more information you will get.

    . workdir DIRECTORY

$obj->selectFiles(WHICH, LIST)

    Returns two array references: the first with files to process, and the second with files which do not need to be processed. WHICH comes from processFiles(select) and the LIST are files from a manifest.

Preparation

$obj->expandManuals

    Take all manuals, and fill them with the info all the super classes. Some of this data may actually be used when formatting the manual into pages.

$obj->getPackageRelations

    Compile all files which contain packages, and then try to find-out how they are related.

$obj->prepare(OPTIONS)

    Add information to the documentation tree about inheritance relationships of the packages. prepare must be called between processFiles() and createManual().

     Option   Defined in  Default      
 verbose              <from object>

    . verbose INTEGER

Formatter

$obj->createManual(NAME|CLASS|OBJECT, OPTIONS)

    Create a manual for the set of manuals read so far. The manuals are produced by different formatters which produce one page at a time. Returned is the formatter which is used: it may contain useful information for you.

    The first, optional argument specifies the type of pages to be produced. This can be either a predefined NAME (currently available are pod and html representing OODoc::Format::Pod and OODoc::Format::Html subroutine respectively), the name of a CLASS which needs to be instantiated, or an instantiated formatter.

     Option          Defined in       Default           
 append                           C<undef>          
 format_options                   []                
 manifest                         <workdir>/MANIFEST
 verbose                          0                 
 workdir                          <required>

    . append STRING|CODE

    . format_options ARRAY

    . manifest FILENAME|undef

      The names of the produced files are appended to this file. When undef is given, no file will be written for this.

    . verbose INTEGER

      Debug level, the higher the number, the more details about the process you will have.

    . workdir DIRECTORY

      The directory where the output is going to.

$obj->stats

    Returns a string which contains some statistics about the whole parsed document set.

Initiation

OODoc->new(OPTIONS)

Inheritance

$obj->extends([OBJECT])

Commonly used functions

$obj->filenameToPackage(FILENAME)

OODoc->filenameToPackage(FILENAME)

$obj->mergeObjects(OPTIONS)

$obj->mkdirhier(DIRECTORY)

OODoc->mkdirhier(DIRECTORY)

$obj->unique

Manual database

All manuals can be reached everywhere in the program: it is a global collection.

$obj->addManual(MANUAL)

$obj->mainManual(NAME)

$obj->manuals

$obj->manualsForPackage(NAME)

$obj->packageNames

DIAGNOSTICS

Error: Cannot compile $parser class

The $parser class does not exist or produces compiler errors.

Error: Parser $parser could not be instantiated

Something went wrong while starting the parser object. Probably there is an other error message which will tell you the exact cause.

Error: cannot copy distribution file $fn to $dest: $!

For some reason, a plain file from can not be copied from your source tree to the location where the distribution is made.

Error: do not understand your file selection

The files option is not understood. You may specify an ARRAY, regular expression, or a code reference.

Error: formatter $name has compilation errors: $@

The formatter which is specified does not compile, so can not be used.

Error: manual definition requires manual object

A call to addManual() expects a new manual object (a OODoc::Manual), however an incompatible thing was passed. Usually, intended was a call to manualsForPackage() or mainManual().

Warning: no file $fn to include in the distribution

Probably your MANIFEST file lists this file which does not exist. The file will be skipped for now, but may cause problems later on.

Warning: order conflict "$take" before "$insert" in $file line $number

The order of the objects in a sub-class shall be the same as that of the super class, otherwise the result of merging of the information received from both classes is undertermined.

Error: problems compiling $code for package $name: $@

Syntax error in your code, or a problem caused by stripping the file. You can run your test-scripts before the files get stripped as long as you do not use make test, because that will try to produce manual-pages as well...

Error: requires a directory to write the distribution to

You have to give a value to workdir. When processing the manifest file, some files must be copied directly to a temporary directory. The packages are first stripped from their pseudo doc, and then written to the same directory. That directory will be the place where make dist is run later.

Error: requires a directory to write the manuals to

You have to give a value to workdir, which will be used as top directory for the produced output. It does not matter whether there is already some stuff in that directory.

DETAILS

Why use OODoc in stead of POD

POD (Perl's standard Plain Old Document format) has a very simple syntax. POD is very simple to learn, and the produced manual pages look like normal Unix manual pages. However, when you start writing larger programs, you start seeing the weaker sites of POD.

One of the main problems with POD is that is using a visual markup style: you specify information by how it must be presented to the viewer. This in contrast with logical markup where you specify the information more abstract, and a visual representation is created by translation. For instance in HTML defines a I tag (visual markup italic) and EM (logical markup emphasis, which will usually show as italic).

The main disadvantage of visual markup is lost information: the formatter of the manual page can not help the author of the documentation to produce more consistent manual pages. This is not a problem for small modules, but is much more needed when programs grow larger.

How does OODoc work

Like with POD, you simply mix your documentation with your code. When the module is distributed, this information is stripped from the files by a parser, and translated into an object tree. This tree is then optimized: items combined, reorganized, etc, to collect all information required to produce useable manual pages. Then, a formatter is called to generate the manual pages.

The parser

The parser reads the package files, and (by default) strip them from all documentation. The stripped files are written to a temporary directory which is used to create the module distribution.

It is possible to use more than one parser for your documentation. On this moment, there is only one parser implemented: the Markov parser, named after the author. But you can add your own parser, if you want to. Within one module, different files can be parsed by different parsers.

The parser produces an object tree, which is a structured representation of the documentation. The tree is parser independent, and organized by manual page.

Collecting relations

The second phase of the manual page generation process figures out the relations between the manual pages. It collects inheritance relations and other organizational information which is to be used by the manual page generators.

The formatter

The final phase can be called more than once: based on the same object tree, documents can be produced in various formats. The initial implementation produces POD and HTML.

Getting Started

To use OODoc, you need to create a scripts which helps you producing the distribution of your module. The simpest script look like this:

 use OODoc;
 my $dist = '/tmp/abc';
 my $doc  = OODoc->new
  ( module     => 'E-mail handling'
  , version    => '0.01'
  , workdir    => $dist
  );

 $doc->processFiles;        # parsing
 $doc->prepare;             # collecting
 $doc->createManual('pod'); # formatting to POD

The default parser will be used to process the files, see OODoc::Parser::Markov for its syntax. The formatter is described in OODoc::Format::Pod.

Once you have this working, you may decide to add options to the calls to adapt the result more to your own taste.

REFERENCES

See the OODoc website at $website for more details.

COPYRIGHTS

Module version $version. Written by Mark Overmeer (mark@overmeer.net). See the ChangeLog for other contributors.

Copyright (c) 2001-2002 by the authors. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.