Re: [Doxygen-develop] dynamic 'protected' display

[Chris C. <do...@ke...>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:30:06PM -0400, Ethan Tira-Thompson wrote:

> Another feature I am interested in is extending HTML_DYNAMIC_SECTIONS  
> to allow users to show or hide the 'protected' fields.
> 
> Some classes are meant to be used 'as is', and protected methods/ 
> members are only intended for future expansion by the library authors,  
> and so are not of interest to library users reading the documentation.
> 
> Other classes are meant to be subclassed by end-users, in order to  
> pass their classes back into the library.  In this case they would be  
> interested in the documentation for protected methods.

If I understand your idea, a good example would be the STL iostreams
classes.  Most people are only interested in using the public
interfaces, but implementorsneed the documentation of the protected
virtual functions so that they can provide the implementation of the
'hooks' (for instance a TCP/IP socket stream which isn't in the standard
but can be implemented quite easily -- I know of several implementations
including my own).

If I understand you, the idea is to allow such data to be 'unfolded' at
will by the programmer, rather than having to run the whole thing
through Doxygen with different settings.  This strikes me as a good
idea, since the documentation is often on a website and not easily
re-created (it required that the user has Doxygen, for a start).

Chris C