Generate DQMH based project documentation automatically with Antidoc

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Olivier Jourdan is a guest blogger and is the founder and owner of Wovalab. Wovalab is a DQMH Trusted Advisor located in France. They focus on helping teams with their software engineering needs.

Writing documentation is not the favorite task for a developer. However, project documentation can be beneficial in at least two ways:

  • First, it can help onboard new developers in your team or help you start a new feature development after not working on the project for a long time.
  • Second, it should help you to review or debug code.

To allow these benefits, your documentation needs to be valuable (not just a list of VI’s description, for example) and up to date with the last code modification.

Antidoc, an open-source project, released in July 2020, and the DQMH® framework can be a powerful combination.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQW4HDjRPoE]

Automation

Keeping your documentation up to date is fastidious, and there is a good chance that this task will be the first to be bypassed when deadlines are putting pressure on you and your team. 

Antidoc is the best cure to fix this recurring affliction. It parses your LabVIEW project to find information and generates a file that organizes and tracks down content. This file can be rendered in HTML 5 or PDF format.

Used in conjunction with CI (Continuous Integration), Antidoc allows you to update documentation each time you commit code modifications without effort.

 

Content

Documentation is useful only if it contains valuable content. One of the goals of Antidoc is to use the information available in the LabVIEW project to minimize the use of text editors (LabVIEW is our favorite tool, not Microsoft Word, isn’t it?).

Antidoc retrieves content from .lvproj, .lvlib, .lvclass, and .vi descriptions, but it’s not enough to write useful content to your documentation.

That’s where the DQMH® framework comes in. With its concepts (module, request, broadcast, etc.) and the standardization of the code made by LabVIEW developers who use it, Antidoc can find and show relationships and data interaction of your entire project:

  • Which module uses the request of a specific module? 
  • Where does a module start and stop?
  • Which module is listening to a broadcast?

This content is a powerful tool to understand the architecture of your code. Moreover, it allows you to track issues and review the architecture of your project with your team quickly.

The output you can obtain

To have a glimpse of what you can obtain with Antidoc, have a look, below, at the documentation generated from the CML project provided with the DQMH® framework.

You can also see the whole document as a PDF or HTML5 file format.

 

Module list table

Graph relationship overview

Detailed relationships for each DQMH® module

Available for free

Antidoc is a free tool available as open-source. You can help its development by sharing new feature ideas or bugs found here

2 responses to “Generate DQMH based project documentation automatically with Antidoc”

  1. Fabiola De la Cueva Avatar
    Fabiola De la Cueva

    I love this tool so much! Today I was able to get a better idea of a new customer’s code. Thanks again Olivier!

    Best regards,
    Fab

  2. Olivier Avatar

    Thanks, Fab
    That’s the kind of feedback that keeps me motivated to improve Antidoc!

    💚💚💚

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