#46 Parse Comments in Implementation Section

[Larry Hengen]

PasDoc seems to work well, and I have adjusted my JavaDoc comments in hcOPF in order to use it, until I discovered that it does not extract comments from the implementation section. This makes it unusable as far as I am concerned. I have rather large comment blocks at the start of each method, and I want them to stay within the method commented so I can move the code without losing the comment attached to it. It also makes more sense to have the comments as close to the actual code as possible so developers can understand the code easier by reading the comments that appear on the screen at the same time, and more importantly update the comments to ensure they are kept current.

Is this feature likely to be released any time soon, or should I search for an alternative?

[Michalis Kamburelis]

This feature was requested many times, but so far noone who is interested in it provided necessary patches. See http://pasdoc.sipsolutions.net/WantedFeaturesParsingImplementation, and the mailing list, like the last thread "[Pasdoc-main] Comments for methods". So, contributions are welcome!

[Marcos Rocha]

I was talking with a coworker about it and we agreed that developers hardly ever stay at interface section. Normally we (developers) stay at implementation section, so why leave "trash" at the implementation section instead of write them at the interface section?
Moreover, since of Delphi XE2 you can use DocInsight to see documentation about the classes that were written at interface section.
In other hand, legacy code brings comments before procedures and functions inside implementation section, I am moving those comments to interface section not just to document with PasDoc, but for cleaning too.

[Vasek Cejka]

Hi everybody,
I really feel need of parsing implementation section for type definitions, not primary for code itself. I planned to try it around the end of the year, but I will be glad to cooperate with anyone willing to.
My main reason is called Dependency Injection. In our work we try to stand on this principle and generally principle of Inversion of Control a lot. For anyone interested, you might look e.g. at http://www.nickhodges.com/page/Dependency-Injection-Series.aspx for some simple examples and descriptions. I'm not sure, how much it is applicable in FPC since strong use of generics, attributes and RTTI is needed. But we are Delphi users.
For short, our implementation sections contain mostly interface definitions only, which is OK for documentation purposes of PasDoc. Implementing classes of mostly hidden in the implementation section. There is not such need of basic documentation, but it is very useful to reveal some inner structure of the code for other developers also.
I do not plan to force anyone to use this approach, so I will not describe it in more details, but I just wanted to show shortly my motivation and say "Yes", I plan to work on this feature, and "Yes", if you need it for some reason also, and "Yes", if you want to cooperate on the implementation of this feature.

[Marcos Rocha]

Nice, I'll will take part in this feature and ask you for 3 prerequisites.

1. If there is documentation at interface section, comments at head of implementation functions, classes and methods should be concatenated to doc.
2. This new feature must be enabled and disabled by a property to keep current behavior.
3. Have to be implemented at GUI and Console a way to use this new feature.

I put myself at your service to help you.