Documenting Delphi

Question

Hi

Is there a good tool for scanning a Delphi project and organising the units, forms etc. Maybe it could go down to procedure level and say output to Word or RTF.

This would allow me to get a first cut documentation going for a large product.

thanks Andrew

Answer 1

Yes its called Delphi code to doc, it uses javaDoc style tags to produce a windows help file.

But to get the most out of it you will need all the function/procedure/class etc comments to be in javaDoc for eg

{**
*  @auther your name
*  description your description here
*}

I use it on our large code base at work, but its taking a long time to unify the comments into the correct format.

EDIT: and its totally free :D

Answer 2

I think the best tool for documenting delphi is PasDoc.

Apart from providing you with an HTML or CHM document with a very well structured index of all the classes, methods and properties you have on your code, it allows for code comments like this:

{
@abstract(Concatenate two strings)
@param(AStringA The first string to concatenate)
@param(AStringB The second string to concatenate)
@returns(The concatenated string)
}
function Concatenate(AStringA, AStringB : string) : string;

Here you have the output documentation for the PasDoc itself., supported tags and the download page. It also open source and I obviously, written in Delphi

Answer 3

Since Delphi 2005 it is build in the Delphi compiler. It uses the XMLDoc standard which uses XML style comments. See http://dn.codegear.com/article/32770 and http://tondrej.blogspot.com/2006/03/xml-documentation-in-delphi-2006.html

Answer 4

Take a look also at Doc-O-Matic: http://www.doc-o-matic.com/

Answer 5

A place to go from there to get a grip of legacy code would be software archeology, using some of the built in measures and metrics of Delphi 2007/2009. Listen to Introduction to Software Archeology on CodeRage II replays.

Answer 6

Another option would be Pascal Browser (PAB) from http://www.peganza.com/#PAB
The Pascal Analyzer from Peganza is also worth a look.

Answer 7

Help Scribble has quite a good feature that allows you to point it at a dpr file and it builds an entire windows helpfile with the structure of your code. It has a standard format that can be used to ensure you get the right information from each unit, class and function. Its quite quick and effective.

Answer 8

I'm using JADD - Just Another DelphiDoc fom time to time because it can be used to generate class diagramms quickly. But it doesn't fully support the most recent versions of Delphi. Here is an example of a very simple diagramm.

Answer 9

[Help and Manual has excellent Delphi documentation support] . There is also a nice screen capture and image manipulation tool ( crop / drop shadow etc.,) that is integrated into the package. [1]