Brian Ray's Blog : MacDev/doxygenxcode.html

Tonight I wrote a small scripting suite for adding documentation comments to code for doxygen to parse in xcode.

Check it out.

It's very small and not very well tested. But I noticed apple's own HeaderDoc support and wanted support for doxygen as well. These tools parse source code and look in the commented section for documentation keywords. From there, they produce high quality dynamic documentation in html and other formats. Doxygen produces some nice UML type class diagrams as well.

I always saw projects documented with doxygen and wondered how they do it. It's really quite easy. Mac OSX comes with a gui. However, I prefer making a separate build target in xcode and compile my C++ code with a simple shell script. Here is mine if your interested:

#!/bin/sh

# clean the directory
rm -r docs/doxygen

# generate docs
/Developer/Applications/Doxygen.app/Contents/Resources/doxygen  doxygen/Doxyfile

# open the html documentation
open docs/doxygen/html/index.html

I add this a separate build target and then used a Run Script Build Phase. I use xcode 2.0 however these scripts work even back in Project Builder, AFAIK.