Doxygen How-To

Introduction

According to Wikipedia:

Doxygen is a tool for writing software reference documentation. The documentation is written within code, and is thus relatively easy to keep up to date. Doxygen can cross reference documentation and code, so that the reader of a document can easily refer to the actual code.

We provide the doxygen online for each release of OpenSim. For example, the 2.4 doxygen can be found at https://simtk.org/api_docs/opensim/api_docs24/. You can also generate the doxygen yourself from the OpenSim source code.

Install Doxygen

If you are building from source and want to generate the corresponding doxygen documentation, you first need to install Doxygen on your computer:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/doxygen/

After installing doxygen, you will need to re-run CMake:

1. Close the OpenSim.sln file. 
2. Launch CMake, and respecify the settings as described in Building OpenSim from Source.
3. Hit configure and then generate
4. Close CMake, then relaunch the OpenSim.sln file

Generate and Explore the Doxygen Documentation

1. To generate the doxygen documentation, right click on the doxygen project and select "Build".
2. This will generate a set of html files in the folder "html" in your OpenSim build directory. Navigate to this folder and double click on "index.html" to view the main landing page.
3. Explore the Class List and Class Hierarchy using the navigation pane on the left. You can also search Doxygen using the box in the top right.

Adding to and Updating Doxygen

• The doxygen comments that appear in the html file for each class are generate from a classes header file. 
• The best way to get oriented to doxygen is to review some examples. Some well documented classes include:
  • ModelComponent
  • MuscleCurveFunctionFactor
• If you update the doxygen comments for a class, rebuild the "doxygen" target to check that there are no errors and your documentation appears as expected. 
• The doxygen manual also provides information about the available commands and usage: http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual.html
• Doxygen only generates documentation from .h files, not .cpp files.
• Convention for figures: fig_CLASSNAME_FIGNAME