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  1. JDK
  2. JDK-6190998

Method categories

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    • Icon: Enhancement Enhancement
    • Resolution: Duplicate
    • Icon: P4 P4
    • 5.0
    • 5.0
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      A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
      In the Smalltalk language there is a nice feature - Classes and methods can have set a category. In Java classes are divided into packages, but there is lack of method categories.

        Category has only a documenting meaning, it has no importance for building and running the application. You just say, that the method is, for example, initializing instances. And an other method can be marked as "converting" and anybody now knows, that the method is used to convert the object to any other type or via versa. Probably the most usual and useful usage of such as marking is generating javadoc - you can generate javadoc that would have methods divided into categories. Such a documentation would be generally more useful.

      It would be useful, to have a set of common categories, that are well known by all developers. Developers can, of course, use their project specific categories (for example "CustomerSupport").

      Probably the most natural way to add categories is to add a @category("name") anotation for method or add @category as a javadoc tag.


      JUSTIFICATION :
      This feature would make documentation more readable and usefull. It would also improve selfdocumenting of code and its readibility.

      EXPECTED VERSUS ACTUAL BEHAVIOR :
      EXPECTED -
      Javadoc should (optionaly) generate documentation wih classes divided to subcategories.
      ACTUAL -
      There is no such a thing as a category.
      ###@###.### 11/4/04 21:54 GMT

            Unassigned Unassigned
            rmandalasunw Ranjith Mandala (Inactive)
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