I am working on an app which will become quite huge in time. I have decided to use JsDoc3 and DocStrap to document all modules. Modules are defined via require.js and in some places they are nested up to 3 or 4 levels deep.
Until now I understand that JsDoc documentation is split into four main sections: Modules, Classes, Tutorials, Globals. Each section has a header dropdown menu and a sidebar each of them listing all of the modules in linear fashion, alphabetically.
I was wondering if there are options to display/group modules and Classes somehow to reflect the project structure. I saw a git repository that document all the classes with lots of slashes module1/submodule1/class1, but it feels really though to digest this type of navigation. Not to mention that the layout was having trouble with long titles overflowing from the sidebar.
Currently I have a project layout similar to the schema from bellow. It's wide and deep and I expect it to grow further.
/Editor
---/Services
------/UI
------...
---...
---editorApp.js
/Engine
---/Core
------/...
---/Entities
------/...
---/Graphics
------/...
---/...
...
engine.js
/Web
---/Services
------/UI
------...
---...
---webApp.js
Excellent question. I’ve run into the same problem too.
I use namespaces to group classes together into a single package. A big project could have multiple namespaces. A really big project could have namespaces whose members are themselves namespaces.
A namespace is basically a grouping of static objects. You can use @namespace to document an object literal, or a “static class” that shouldn’t be constructed, for example, the native Math class.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to label modules as members of namespaces, so I’ve abandoned the @module tag altogether, using only @class and @namespace. Another really annoying thing about modules is you have to prepend module: in front of every mention of a module in JSDoc comments. E.g. you must do @type {module:my_mod} instead of just @type {my_mod}.
So the structure of your project would look like this:
Editor.js
/**
* description of Editor.
* @namespace Editor
*/
const Editor = {
Services: require('./Services.js'),
...
}
module.exports = Editor
Services.js
/**
* description of Services.
* @namespace Editor.Services
* ^^^^^^^ shows it’s a member of Editor
*/
const Services = {
UI: require('./UI.js'),
...
}
module.exports = Services
UI.js (let’s say UI is a class)
/**
* description of UI.
* @memberof Editor.Services
* ^^^^^^^^^ need to tell JSDoc UI is a member
* @class
* ^^^^^^ optional, as JSDoc knows ES6 classes
*/
class UI {
constructor() {...}
}
module.exports = UI