AdeliaDoc is a tool for generating technical documentation associated with Adelia programs based on the analysis of 4GL sources and the use of program description information.
The produced documentation is standardized and describes the programs, public procedures and call parameters for each of these entities.
A set of specific annotations in the form of comments to add to the 4GL source enables developers to customize the content of the generated documentation. This system allows the source code and associated documentation elements to be kept in the same place.
Using a "documentation project" concept, AdeliaDoc produces different documents from the same Adelia environment. Each project has its own configuration.
AdeliaDoc is designed to document Adelia (batch, interactive) and Visual Adelia (batch, server and interactive) type programs and classes referenced as call parameters for the latter at different levels including whole Adelia repository, application area (or list of application areas), build components (or list of build components), or for a specific set of programs.
The sources of unit test programs and REST and SOAP web services are excluded from the scope, bearing in mind that applicable documentation is already available for the latter via Swagger (REST) or WSDL for SOAP.
Additional user filters can be applied each time to refine the list of programs for which the documentation will be generated.
Similarly, configuration parameters can be used to modify certain generation rules to take specific requirements into account.
Using the Sphinx documentation generation tool, AdeliaDoc allows documentation to be produced in HTML, Latex, PDF, Plain text and reStructuredText (markup language) formats as required.
Sphinx is a configurable tool offering numerous customization options for the produced document.
It is important to note that AdeliaDoc operates incrementally, meaning that from one documentation generation to another, only the documentation pages for which the corresponding source programs (and/or their dependencies) have changed are regenerated.
Finally, although as it stands, multilingual documentation cannot be produced, AdeliaDoc does enable the user to localize the generated documentation in more than 50 languages.
