Doxygen: Automatic link generation (original) (raw)

Most documentation systems have special ‘see also’ sections where links to other pieces of documentation can be inserted. Although Doxygen also has a command to start such a section (See section \sa), it does allow you to put these kind of links anywhere in the documentation. For {\LaTeX} documentation a reference to the page number is written instead of a link. Furthermore, the index at the end of the document can be used to quickly find the documentation of a member, class, namespace or file. For man pages no reference information is generated.

The next sections show how to generate links to the various documented entities in a source file.

Doxygen will automatically replace any URLs and mail addresses found in the documentation by links (in HTML). To manually specify link text, use the HTML 'a' tag:

link text

which will be automatically translated to other output formats by Doxygen.

All words in the documentation that correspond to a documented class and contain at least one non-lower case character will automatically be replaced by a link to the page containing the documentation of the class. If you want to prevent that a word that corresponds to a documented class is replaced by a link you should put a % in front of the word. To link to an all lower case symbol, use \ref.

All words that contain a dot (.) that is not the last character in the word are considered to be file names. If the word is indeed the name of a documented input file, a link will automatically be created to the documentation of that file.

Links to functions are created if one of the following patterns is encountered:

  1. "("")"
  2. "()"
  3. "::"
  4. ("::")n"("")"
  5. ("::")n"("")"
  6. ("::")n"()"
  7. ("::")n

where n>0.

Note 1:

Function arguments should be specified with correct types, i.e. 'fun(const std::string&,bool)' or '()' to match any prototype.

Note 2:

Member function modifiers (like 'const' and 'volatile') are required to identify the target, i.e. 'func(int) const' and 'func(int)' target different member functions.

Note 3:

For Javadoc compatibility a # may be used instead of a :: in the patterns above.

Note 4:

In the documentation of a class containing a member foo, a reference to a global variable is made using "::foo", whereas #foo will link to the member.

For non overloaded members the argument list may be omitted.

If a function is overloaded and no matching argument list is specified (i.e. pattern 2 or 6 is used), a link will be created to the documentation of one of the overloaded members.

For member functions the class scope (as used in patterns 4 to 7) may be omitted, if:

  1. The pattern points to a documented member that belongs to the same class as the documentation block that contains the pattern.
  2. The class that corresponds to the documentation blocks that contains the pattern has a base class that contains a documented member that matches the pattern.

All of these entities can be linked to in the same way as described in the previous section. For sake of clarity it is advised to only use patterns 3 and 7 in this case.

Example:

class Autolink_Test

{

public:

Autolink_Test();

~Autolink_Test();

void member(int);

void member(int,int);

enum EType {

Val1,

Val2

};

protected:

int var;

};

Autolink_Test::Autolink_Test() { }

Autolink_Test::~Autolink_Test() { }

int globVar;

enum GlobEnum {

GVal1,

GVal2

};

#define ABS(x) (((x)>0)?(x):-(x))

typedef Autolink_Test B;

Click here for the corresponding HTML documentation that is generated by Doxygen.

typedefs

Typedefs that involve classes, structs and unions, like

typedef struct StructName TypeName

create an alias for StructName, so links will be generated to StructName, when either StructName itself or TypeName is encountered.

Example:

struct CoordStruct

{

float x;

float y;

};

typedef CoordStruct Coord;

Coord add(Coord c1,Coord c2)

{

}

Click here for the corresponding HTML documentation that is generated by Doxygen.

Go to the next section or return to theindex.