Running the GUI client

The GUI client provides an interface to easily edit all options that can be set on a project, as well as to add and remove the files and directories that a project consists of.

When the GUI is started for the first time, it starts with the provided example project. The example project contains a single file that defines the built-in members of a JavaScript implementation. This file is provided so that it can be referenced in projects built with JavaScript for API completeness. For more information about this, see Base files.

The GUI is divided in following sections:

Project toolbar ¶

From the project toolbar you can invoke the base project operations such as New, Open and Save, as well as invoke the Build documentation action and Cancel the build in progress, should you wish to.

Once a build completes, or if a build has been previously completed you can view the resulting HTML by using the View command button on the toolbar. This command will open the documentation main page in your default browser.

Project files and directories ¶

In this section, you can defined the files and folders that a project consists of. If you press Add, a dialog will appear in which you can choose to add either a file, or a folder.

If you add a folder, if will be scanned for files ending with extensions specified for that folder.

The files that have been added, together with the files found in the folders that have been added, will be all be parsed and from that the resulting documentation will be generated.

Project options ¶

In this section you can set various project options:

General ¶

Name ¶

This is the name of the project as it will appear in the resulting documentation.

Theme ¶

This is the theme to use for generating documentation. A theme is a set of templates, images, scripts and stylesheets that control how the documentation markup will be generated, how it will look and to a certain extent, how it will behave.

Use multiple inheritance ¶

If the ECMAScript project being documented uses some kind of inheritance mechanism that supports multiple parents (where a child class can have multiple parent classes), you would want to set this option to True. This will enable ECMADoc to store multiple parents per class and will affect how this will be appear in the output HTML.

Output ¶

Output path ¶

Specifies the folder in which the generated documentation will be saved.

File extension ¶

Specifies the extension that the generated files should have. Typically this will be '.htm' or '.html'.

Output members on one page ¶

This option controls whether the members of a type should appear on the same page as their containing type, or on separate pages. With this option set to True, all class properties, methods etc will appear on the same page as the class itself. With this option set to False, each member will appear on a separate page.

If you choose for all members on one page, the number of html files in the output will be smaller, but the pages themselves may potentially be quite large. With every member on its own page the pages will likely be small and concise, but the number of files will be much bigger. You should evaluate both approaches and choose the one which better suits your requirements.

Output anonymous functions ¶

By the default, ECMADoc will not output functions that are completely anonymous (when they neither have a name, nor a variable pointing to them). If you want these functions to appear in the output you can set this option to True.

Output private members ¶

By the default, ECMADoc will not output private members. If you set this option to True, the private members will appear in the output. Note that you will still have the option to toggle them in the interface.

Group members by ¶

Here you can choose to group members by type. With this option set, the tree view will group members of the same type into folders. Note that if a type only has one kind of members, the folders will not appear.

Parser Log ¶

Log file name ¶

Sets the name of the file where trace log messages will be stored to. The file will appear in the folder specified with the Output path option

Log format ¶

Controls the format of the log file (HTML or Text). Currently only the Text format is supported,

Log level ¶

Specifies the minimum severity level for messages to appear in the output log.

Message section ¶

Informational messages from the program related to what you may be doing will appear in this section.