User Command ADOC (Dyalog)

Overview

ADOC is a utility useful to generate documentation (semi-) automatically from class scripts as well as namespace scripts.

Obviously it makes sense to make ADOC's services available as a User Command.

This page offers a small class script ADOC_UC.dyalog which is designed to do exactly that.

Assumptions

In order to make ADOC available as a user command the script ADOC_UC.dyalog ("UC" for User Command) attached to this page must go somewhere where Dyalog is able to find it. There are to options:

Move it into Salt\Spice inside the Dyalog installation folder. That's where the Dyalog User Commands are located.
Create a particular folder for your own User Commands.

Although the first option is certainly easier, it's actually the second one which is recommended. There are a couple of reasons:

Messing Dyalog scripts with your scripts is not a good idea.
When a new version of Dyalog arrives you are in trouble.
Having a separate folder for your own User Commands allows you to overwrite a Dyalog User Command with an improved version you are not going to loose in case of an update or a new version.

To make your own User Command folder work you have to do a couple of things:

Add the folder to the SALT search path.
Create another folder which is going to host the "real thing". A recommended name is "UserCommandCode".
Copy the script ADOC.dyalog from the ADOC page into that folder.
Create a registry entry pointing to that new folder with the name HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Dyalog\Dyalog APL/W 12.1 Unicode\SALT\CodeFolder

Note that the script attached to this page only deals with two issues:

Figure out what command the user wants to invoke, "Browse" or "List".
Find the real work horse and call it, see below.

In order to achieve that the script ADOC_UC.dyalog reads the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Dyalog\Dyalog APL/W 12.1 Unicode\SALT\CodeFolder from the Windows registry. It then tries to load the "real" ADOC script from that folder.

Note that not only our examples given on this page but also the code in ADOC_UC.dyalog all refer to version 12.1 Unicode of Dyalog. If your are using a different version of Dyalog of course you must change the script, otherwise it's not going to work.

Samples

Given that the two different ADOC scripts went into the right folders, this would be a sample session:

      ]?ADOC
"??" for general help, "?CMD" for more specific info on command CMD

 Group  Name         Description
 =====  ====         ===========
 ADOC   ADOC.Browse  Creates full documentation and displayes it in the default browser.
        ADOC.HELP    Displays help regarding ADOC.
        ADOC.List    Prints syntax of all public stuff to the session.

      ]?ADOC.Browse
Command "ADOC.Browse". Syntax: 1 arguments; accepts switches -b=
Script location: ........\....\....\ADOC

Gathers information from a class script, compiles
an HTML page with these pieces of information
and displays it in your default browser.

      ]?ADOC.List
Command "ADOC.List".
Script location: ........\...\...\ADOC

Prints a list with all sorts of information to the session
about all public stuff given in the script specified in the right argument

]ADOC.Help
Watch your browser

Shows extensive information about ADOC. It's basically doing `ADOC.Browse ADOC`.

Download

Download the script.

Version

The script is version 1.2.0 from 2011-08-04

Author: KaiJaeger

-- KaiJaeger 2011-08-04 19:54:50

CategoryDyalogUserCommands