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Retired Document

Important: This document may not represent best practices for current development. Links to downloads and other resources may no longer be valid.

HeaderDoc Class Hierarchy

HeaderElement (Root Class--any header entity that's significant)

 | (to HeaderDoc is a HeaderElement)

 |-----------APIOwner (Object that owns declared API)

| |

 | |-------Header (Owner for header-wide API)

| |

 | |-------CPPClass (Container for all non-Objective-C classes and

 | |                    C pseudoclass/COM Interface APIs).

| |

 | |-------ObjCContainer

 |   |

 |   |-------ObjCClass (Owner for Objective-C class API)

 |   |

 |   |-------ObjCCategory (Owner for Objective-C category API)

 |   |

 |   |-------ObjCProtocol (Owner for Objective-C protocol API)

 |-----------Method (an Objective-C method)

 |-----------Constant

 |-----------Enum

 |-----------Function (any non-objective-C function or method)

 |-----------MinorAPIElement (parameter, members of structs)

 |-----------PDefine

 |-----------Struct (for both structs and unions)

| |

 | |-------Var (subclass of Struct so that it can contain fields)

 |-----------Typedef

DocReference (Another root class. Used by gatherHeaderDoc to store

             information about documentation framesets within an

             input folder. The script uses this information to

             construct a top-level table of contents with links

             to each frameset.)

ParseTree (Token tree instantiated from BlockParse.pm.)

ParserState (Parser state instance instantiated from BlockParse.pm and stored

            in certain tokens within a ParseTree instance.)

IncludeHash (a simple data structure for storing information about a

            #include directive.)

In addition to the classes shown above, the headerdoc2html/headerDoc2HTML.pl script also uses the non–object-oriented modules Utilities.pm, ClassArray.pm, and BlockParse.pm. Most class instances are instantiated from headerdoc2html/headerDoc2HTML.pl based on the results of a call to blockParse.

The ParseTree class is instantiated in the block parser itself. It contains a token tree and a set of operations on that tree (print the tree, return a text or html representation of the tree, walk the parse tree for parameters, walk the parse tree for embedded HeaderDoc markup, and so on).

The ParserState class is also instantiated in the block parser. It contains only three methods (new, _initialize, and print), and is primarily just a giant hash with some pre-defined values.

The IncludeHash class is essentially just a simple data structure to handle basic information about #include directives. It has two methods (new and _initialize).

The gatherHeaderDoc tool uses an external program, resolveLinks, to convert special “link request” comments into links to other files in the directory being processed. This tool (written in C) resides in the bin directory within the HeaderDoc modules directory.

HeaderDoc uses xmllint (from libxml) to convert HTML into XHTML when generating XML output. HeaderDoc also uses hdxml2manxml and xml2man from the MPGL suite to generate man pages.

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