Hi, has anyone ever tried to generate Flare-compatible XHTML from API documentation comments in source code? We have such comments and are currently injecting them in HTML output via DocBook, but our main manual is now in Flare, and we are wondering if it is possible to adjust the flow to generate XHTML that we can then auto-sync into Flare at the time we build the HTML5 output.
Thanks,
Jeanne
Generate Flare XHTML from doc comments in source code
Re: Generate Flare XHTML from doc comments in source code
I haven't tried to do that, no.
Whether you can do it probably depends on whether you can massage your generation process to generate HTML topics or snippets. You might also be able to write them as the definitions of variables in an XML variable file. In either the snippet or variable case, you would have a project set up to display them in the appropriate places. The problem with this is that if you are adding new elements to your API which would generate new snippets or variables you would need to go back and add references to those within a topic. In that case you probably need to generate whole topics.
Flare is quite tolerant of outside meddling with a project like this but the files you create must be valid XHTML or XML as appropriate. If the project has a master stylesheet then you would not need to insert a stylesheet reference as Flare will do that for you, but the master stylesheet must then have the styles you need.
Whether you can do it probably depends on whether you can massage your generation process to generate HTML topics or snippets. You might also be able to write them as the definitions of variables in an XML variable file. In either the snippet or variable case, you would have a project set up to display them in the appropriate places. The problem with this is that if you are adding new elements to your API which would generate new snippets or variables you would need to go back and add references to those within a topic. In that case you probably need to generate whole topics.
Flare is quite tolerant of outside meddling with a project like this but the files you create must be valid XHTML or XML as appropriate. If the project has a master stylesheet then you would not need to insert a stylesheet reference as Flare will do that for you, but the master stylesheet must then have the styles you need.