Any software to auto generate doxygen comment blocks?

Question

Hello, i'm developing a quite big C++ software and now (better late than neve :)) i've decided to document it in the doxy standards. There are plenty of classes, methods, functions, macros and so on therefore i'm searching for a software that would scan my source tree and insert doxy comment blocks on top of every "documentable item" to let me edit them later and add details such as methods description and so on.

Some hint?

edit

I'm under GNU/Linux with Code::Blocks IDE, so no VisualStudio plugins needed .

Answer 1

You can set Doxygen to extract non-documented items as well - that may do what you want without adding ANY comment blocks to the code yet.

After that you can create templates / macros (depends on your IDE) to create pre-formatted blocks for each type of item, as you slowly work through the code documenting items one by one.

[edit] If you're using Visual Studio, some introspection is available on the classes and other constructs in the file, that may help. Alternatively take a look at Doxycomment - it might be some of what you want.

Answer 2

I am quite perplex here.

What is the goal of automatically generating comments ?

Comments are meant to bring additional value:

/**
 * \brief: finds the person based on its name
 * \param: name, the name of the person
 * \result: the person
 */
Person findPerson(Name name);

Is nothing but code clutter that clog my valuable screen estate. And that's about as much as can be generated automatically unfortunately... Notice in particular that I have no idea of what happens if ever the function does not find the person, which certainly seems likely: does it abort ? throws ? (what... ?) returns a default constructed object ?

On the other hand:

///
/// Try an exact match approach to begin with
/// Uses the double metaphone algorithm
///   if none was found as we have
///   a western european clientele
///
Person findPerson(Name name)
{
}

is much more interesting!

• Now I know what is this strange collection of if that seems to be performing some kind of sound recognition...
• I know its name so I can look it up on Internet to check its implementation (functionality)
• And I know why it was selected and thus when I should reevaluate its use (fits a western european clientele so if we develop on arabic market it'll need adaptation...)

Unfortunately, that's not going to be generated automatically.