Re: [Doxygen-users] Re: templates and association diagrams

[Dimitri v. H. <di...@st...>]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 02:16:18PM +0000, James Ahlborn wrote:
> > Onorio Catenacci <Onorio.Catenacci <at> Compuware.Com> writes:
> 
> 
> > I've been a little hesitant to join this discussion because this is just 
> > pure speculation on my part.  However, with that proviso in mind, I 
> > think you're going to be disappointed on this issue.  I think in order 
> > to get the functionality you're looking for (on a generic basis as 
> > opposed to the special case that the sed pattern covers) Doxygen would 
> > have to have compiler-like abilities.  Dmitri has said on more than one 
> > occasion that Doxygen is not a compiler.
> 
> Well, i agree with you insofar as doxygen should not be a compiler.  however, if
> you look in the general documentation that doxygen generates, this already
> works!  template instances are linked separately to the actual template and the
> template types.  so, for methods that use shared_ptr<bar>, the "shared_ptr" text
> is linked to the shared_ptr documentation, and the "Bar" text is linked to the
> Bar documenation.  doxygen *already* has the appropriate knowledge, it's more a
> matter of applying it to the diagrams.  i don't know how complicated the diagram
> generation is, so i don't know how easy this would be...  

If doxygen sees a (dummy) class definition of shared_ptr that looks like this:

  template<class T> class shared_ptr { T *ptr; };

it will show the relation Foo -> shared_ptr<Bar> -> Bar in the collaboration
diagram for the following already:

  class Bar { };
  class Foo { shared_ptr<Bar> m_bar; };

It think it is good that a user looking at the diagram sees that shared_ptr
is used (instead of direct relation between Foo and Bar) as the shared_ptr
has a special meaning and can never be a real pointer in C++.

Regards,
  Dimitri

P.S. I fixed a number of problems with the template relations in combination
     with typedefs and namespaces in the latest CVS release, so you might
     want to try that.