#63 Including output from |exec or |tool in doc
By: Gary Gray (vengefultacos) - 2008-05-19 18:40
I was very interested to see that RoboDoc lets you call outside tools to do processing. However, I can't see a way to have the result of the |tool or |exec included within the documentation. I started off using one of the examples from the RoboDoc doc:
// |exec |exec echo "All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain." > tears.txt
That worked fine. The echoed text appears within the tears.txt file in the doc directory.
Next, I decided to deleted the "> tears.txt" from the above comment to see if the output of the echo shell command would be included in the documentation. Unfortunately, it isn't. Instead, the echoed text appears on the command line as RoboDoc runs.
The same happens for the |tool command. The result of the command are just echoed on the command line. They have no effect on the documentation output.
So, is there some way of including the values returned by the |exec or |tool calls directly in the documentation output? I know I could dump the data to an html or txt file and link to it from within the documentation, but having to click through a link to get vital information is really poor document design.
I'd like to be able to use |exec or |tool to do call a script to perform some processing of data in the documentation, and then return some text (such as |html and |latex commands) that could include the result of those manipulations. One thing I'd like to do specifically is to expand the shorthand our developers have for stack states in our state machine into something a bit easier for external developers to understand, since they aren't familiar with our notation.
