NAME

Sub::Documentation - Collect documentation for subroutines

VERSION

version 1.100880

SYNOPSIS

    use Sub::Documentation 'add_documentation';

    my $pkg = __PACKAGE__;
    add_documentation(
        package       => $pkg,
        glob_type     => 'CODE',
        name          => 'new',
        type          => 'purpose',
        documentation => 'A constructor.'
    );
    add_documentation(
        package       => $pkg,
        glob_type     => 'SCALAR',
        name          => 'count',
        type          => 'purpose',
        documentation => 'Number of flurbles.'
    );

DESCRIPTION

This module provides support for generating documentation for your subroutines. It does not itself generate the documentation, but relies on tools such as Pod::Weaver::Transformer::AddMethodAutoDoc - which is a plugin to Pod::Weaver that is most likely used in conjunction with Dist::Zilla - to put the collected information to use.

Also see Sub::Documentation::Attributes.

Modules that generate methods - such as Class::Accessor::Installer - might want to use this module. Class::Accessor::Complex, Class::Accessor::Constructor and Class::Accessor::FactoryTyped use Class::Accessor::Installer and so support this kind of auto-generated documentation.

This functions are exported on request.

FUNCTIONS

add_documentation(%args)

Adds documentation. It depends on how you use the collected documentation data, but most tools would use the following key/value pairs:

package

The package for which to add documentation.

glob_type

The kind of symbol that is being documented: CODE, SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH etc. The symbol name alone is insufficient to determine what is being documented - does new refer to the subroutine new() or any of the variables $new, C@new> or %new. Therefore you also need to pass the glob type.

name

The symbol name for which to add documentation, that is, the subroutine name or variable name.

type

The type of documentation to add. This might be purpose, example or the like.

The documentation type is freely definable, but the code that actually generates the documentation, for example, Pod::Weaver::Section::CollectWithAutoDoc needs to understand these documentation types.

documentation

The actual documentation string.

You can add any other key/value pairs which your documentation tool needs. For example, Class::Accessor::Complex generates helper methods for most accessors, so in the documentation tool we would like to know which helper method belongs to which main accessor. For example, for array accessors, foo_push(), shift_foo() and foo_count(), amongst others, all belong to the foo array accessor.

The documentation is stored in a list where each element is the has passed to add_documentation().

get_documentation

Returns the documentation list. This can be used by modules that actually generate the documentation to inspect which documentation has been defined.

search_documentation(%args)

Goes through the list of collected documentation and returns those entries that match the key/value pairs given as the arguments.

For example,

    search_documentation(
        package   => 'Foo::Bar',
        glob_type => 'CODE',
        type      => 'examples',
    );

will return all entries with those key/value pairs.

If a string value in the arguments is compared to an array value in the entry, it is sufficient for one of the array elements to be equal to the required value. For example,

    search_documentation(
        name => 'clear_foo'
    );

will match this entry:

    add_documentation(
        name => [ qw(clear_foo foo_clear) ],
        ...
    );

INSTALLATION

See perlmodinstall for information and options on installing Perl modules.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

No bugs have been reported.

Please report any bugs or feature requests through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Sub-Documentation.

AVAILABILITY

The latest version of this module is available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Visit http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ to find a CPAN site near you, or see http://search.cpan.org/dist/Sub-Documentation/.

The development version lives at http://github.com/hanekomu/Sub-Documentation/. Instead of sending patches, please fork this project using the standard git and github infrastructure.

AUTHOR

  Marcel Gruenauer <marcel@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2010 by Marcel Gruenauer.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

cpanm Sub::Documentation

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Sub::Documentation