About :: DocHelper

DocHelper is a java based utility intended to help in creating self-maintaining documentation. It can be seen as an extended search and replace tool (it does not affect searched files however, in this regard it differs from S+R definition). The goal of DocHelper is to aid in creating automated documentation, from a variety of sources.

To achieve this goal DocHelper hopes to provide an extensible architecture on which to build, making it easy to search new resources, process results in a variety ways and render multiple types of output.

Based on a set of existing resources, the DocHelper can be used to create content. Currently the dochelper only supports flat file creation, however one of the major milestones for a beta releases is implementing multiple renderes that come by default with dochelper to allow for the creation of multiple types of output.

DocHelper came about because of work done at Online. The XINS web services framework is widley utilized at online. XINS provides a framework to easily create a web service that is composed of a set of functions that return varying output, depending on calling convention. XINS also provides a mechanism to call other APIs created with XINS as services from within Java Code. These APIs may be located anywhere. Within XINS/Online speak we call these CAPI(Client API) calls.
During late 2008 I wanted to document, in a visual manner, all calls to client APIs within XINS Function's source code. To do this I needed a way to search multiple sets of files (the source), for multiple regular expressions (the reg exps that matched usual capi calls) and produce a specific type of XML (To use in FreeMind. I found that generally speaking, to create XML and HTML(still markup) I needed to transform my matches using regular expression grouping, and encapsulate the transformations within content (usually the markup).
Thus, DocHelper was born. The first prototype helped me add an ant target that would automatically document these calls and create a mind map (a visual representation) for each API.

Read main Documentation .

The best way to understand what DocHelper does is to see an example: Simple DocHelper Tutorial.