ABAP Documentation Generation, Javadoc-like

[former_member209222]

Hello everyone,

I've got one topic to discuss that I do not find very much information about on SCN. It's about documentation. and I don't mean SAP documentation like help.sap.com, but the documentation about the software we (=developers) are producing by writing ABAP-code. That thing that we tend to neglect.

So is there any tool that is similar to [Javadoc|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javadoc], something like a ABAP Documentation Generator? A tool that generates a code-based documentation out of the source-code comments? As far as I know, there is no such functionality in the ABAP workbench. The only community project I found was ABAP Docs, but that seems to be inactive and is not even accessibly online.

How do you document your software? Do you use external tools, anything that is integrated into the SAP system? Or is it a completely segregated solution like we use in my company (Word)? What strategies do you use to create Architecture Documentation, Technical Documentation and End User Documentation?

It seems to me that there are lots of software solutions that can create modern documentation including different formats, layout templates, guidelines etc. But I haven't found anything related to ABAP development. Maybe the best example is Wikipedias [Comparison of documentation generators|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators]. Just search for ABAP.

I am looking forward to read about your experiences in documenting ABAP software!

[RieSe]

... you might search/google for ABAPDoc. There is meanwhile a 2.* version available. It's free.

Best regards, Stefan

[Former Member]

Hi,

This is an interesting question. The people working actively with ABAP code who might sometimes need to generate (javadoc-like) API documentation are probably the ones who might have an answer. There is a great chance to meet them on the [ABAP Development|/community [original link is broken]; forums.

In general, speaking as technical writer, I could only share some basic ideas. Documentation generators are good for API documentation. End-user, architecture, and other types of documentation should be better written separately, outside the code, using dedicated authoring tools. So if you are after API documentation, do not hesitate to try the documentation generators listed in the link you posted. Surely some of them will fit your needs.

Hope this helps,

Rossen

[former_member209222]

Actually, my post were intended to be posted in the ABAP-Forum. I just hit "Post New Thread" in the wrong browser tab. Unfortunately I couldn't find an option to contact a moderator (except "Report Abuse" which is no choice!), maybe this thread is moved if a mod comes by, that would be nice.

So if you are after API documentation, do not hesitate to try the documentation generators listed in the link you posted. Surely some of them will fit your needs.

Surprisingly (more or less) the list has no entry for a tool that supports ABAP, that was my point.

Certainly an End User Documentation is different to an API documentation (+ Technical, +Architectural, +Marketing), but I am still researching possibilities to connect them so that certain doc types do not fall behind "by design", e.g. end user documentation.

[Former Member]

Surprisingly (more or less) the list has no entry for a tool that supports ABAP, that was my point.

In the [Language support|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators#Language_support] table there is an Any With Comments column. Looking at the examples for [Natural Docs|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Docs] and [ROBODoc|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROBODoc], they might work for ABAP too. YMMV

Hope this helps,

Rossen

[former_member209222]

I could be totally wrong, but as far as I can see, all these tools rely on indexing source code files. In ABAP the source code is jacketed in the ABAP workbench, it would be purely insane to extract all source-code e.g. from a Web Dynpro application to local files for documentation purposes. I heard that Netweaver EHP2 brings along a function to extract UML diagrams out of the code, but I haven't seen that yet and I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better the other way around. Anyway, I hope somebody can tell about other ways of creating API or technical documentation.

[Former Member]

Well, I don't know anything about ABAP, my assumption was that you have access to the source code as a file.

Then a option is perhaps to create an ABAP tool that can automatically extract the code of your project to a file system. If this is possible, you can run it only when you need to create documentation. Then you can run the documentation generator of your choice. If this happens only a few times a year, it makes sense. At least, it would be much more efficient than writing the documentation manually, outside the ABAP code.

Anyway, good luck, and may the source be with you.

[Former Member]

Hi - I was looking into this as well and the closest I saw was to use the abap scan tool, i.e. standard program RS_ABAP_SOURCE_SCAN. This tool is of course typically used to scan for other things, but you can use it as a rudimentary 'javadocs'-like extract, I.e. scan for '', do not exclude comment lines (this checks for '' or '"' in position 1 of a line), and probably setting +/- to 0. You can also save the result list to a local file. Ideally, going forward on your custom code, you could delimit all your code comments with some character that is unique, so as to scan for it later. Let me know your thoughts on this.

Keith