[Doxygen-users] Omitting friend declarations from the documentation

[Stephen G. <ste...@el...>]

Is there a way to tell Doxygen to omit a friend declaration from the
generated documentation?

When creating the user documentation for a library I'd like to hide away
all the details of the implementation, so I have an abstract class
defined in the public header and a concrete class in the implementation.
To discourage the user from trying to derive from the abstract class its
constructor is declared private and the concrete derived class is
declared a friend. Not pretty, but never mind.

Running this through Doxygen, the 'friend' declaration appears, which
means that the user is made aware of the existence - and name - of the
concrete class.

Is it possible to stop Doxygen from including that 'friend' declaration?
Perhaps, as the user documentation is generated with EXTRACT_PRIVATE set
to NO, a 'friend' declaration inside the private: portion of a class
could be treated as any other private member and omitted?

TIA,
Stephen Goudge

Aside: I am aware that I could, pretty much, get the behaviour wanted,
in both the documentation and the way the code behaves, by using a
wrapper class with a private pointer to the concrete object and making
the wrapper delegate via that pointer, as the user documentation doesn't
include the private data - but there is a lot of code to edit :-(
Perhaps if I'd written user documentation first, like teacher said...