Name: dk30142 Date: 11/04/98


Would be useful if JavaDoc did cross-references.

By cross-referencing, I mean who uses
what [implementation], etc.

There is a Perl script by Rolf Howarth,
Parallax Solutions Ltd., available at
http://www.parallax.co.uk/~rolf/download/jxref.html

that tries to do this, but as it is not parsing
the source, it cannot really do it properly.

It would seem that JavaDoc has all that it needs
in place to do this extra step.

It is useful when you need to change an interface.
It is a little shameful in this day and age to
still be relying on grep in this situation.

- Jeff Byers - ###@###.### -
(Review ID: 41823)
======================================================================

from 4282648:

... regarding "uses of the class members", it would be extremely
useful to us to be able to see "who" calls a particular method OR "who"
accesses a particular class variable.

Every software developer on the planet, from time to time, needs to add an
argument to or change the return value of a method. In other cases you may
need to change the data type of a variable OR even remove a variable from a
class. In situations like these it is extremely important to be able to find
all the references to the particular method or variable that you want to
change so that you can properly evaluate the impact of the change you are
about to make.

So, my question then is, does Javadoc produce or gather this cross reference
information for class methods and variables like it does for the classes
themselves. Hopefully the answer to this question is yes and if so, then
hopefully I can access this information in my doclet and produce this extra
cross reference information in the Javadoc's of our system.

neal.gafter@Eng 2001-03-06