doxygen/doc/external.doc

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* Copyright (C) 1997-2015 by Dimitri van Heesch.
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/*! \page external Linking to external documentation
If your project depends on external libraries or tools, there are several
reasons to not include all sources for these with every run of doxygen:
<dl>
<dt>Disk space:<dd> Some documentation may be available outside of the output
directory of doxygen already, for instance somewhere on the web.
You may want to link to these pages instead of generating the documentation
in your local output directory.
<dt>Compilation speed:<dd> External projects typically have a different update
frequency from your own project. It does not make much sense to let doxygen
parse the sources for these external project over and over again, even if
nothing has changed.
<dt>Memory:<dd> For very large source trees, letting doxygen parse all sources
may simply take too much of your system's memory. By dividing the sources
into several "packages", the sources of one package can be parsed by
doxygen, while all other packages that this package depends on, are
linked in externally. This saves a lot of memory.
<dt>Availability:<dd> For some projects that are documented with doxygen,
the sources may just not be available.
<dt>Copyright issues:<dd>If the external
package and its documentation are copyright someone else, it may be
better - or even necessary - to reference it rather than include a
copy of it with your project's documentation. When the author forbids
redistribution, this is necessary. If the author requires compliance
with some license condition as a precondition of redistribution, and
you do not want to be bound by those conditions, referring to their
copy of their documentation is preferable to including a copy.
</dl>
If any of the above apply, you can use doxygen's tag file mechanism.
A tag file is basically a compact representation of the entities found in the
external sources. Doxygen can both generate and read tag files.
To generate a tag file for your project, simply put the name of the
tag file after the \ref cfg_generate_tagfile "GENERATE_TAGFILE" option in
the configuration file.
To combine the output of one or more external projects with your own project
you should specify the name of the tag files after
the \ref cfg_tagfiles "TAGFILES" option in the configuration file.
A tag file typically only contains a relative location of the documentation from the
point where doxygen was run. So when you include a tag file in other project
you have to specify where the external documentation is located in relation this project.
You can do this in the configuration file by assigning the (relative) location to the
tag files specified after the \ref cfg_tagfiles "TAGFILES" configuration
option. If you use a relative path it should be relative with respect to
the directory where the HTML output of your project is generated; so a relative path
from the HTML output directory of a project to the HTML output of the other project that
is linked to.
\par Example:
Suppose you have a project \c proj that uses two external
projects called \c ext1 and \c ext2.
The directory structure looks as follows:
\par
\verbatim
<root>
+- proj
| +- html HTML output directory for proj
| +- src sources for proj
| |- proj.cpp
+- ext1
| +- html HTML output directory for ext1
| |- ext1.tag tag file for ext1
+- ext2
| +- html HTML output directory for ext2
| |- ext2.tag tag file for ext2
|- proj.cfg doxygen configuration file for proj
|- ext1.cfg doxygen configuration file for ext1
|- ext2.cfg doxygen configuration file for ext2
\endverbatim
\par
Then the relevant parts of the configuration files look as follows:
\par
proj.cfg:
\verbatim
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = proj
INPUT = proj/src
TAGFILES = ext1/ext1.tag=../../ext1/html \
ext2/ext2.tag=../../ext2/html
\endverbatim
ext1.cfg:
\verbatim
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = ext1
GENERATE_TAGFILE = ext1/ext1.tag
\endverbatim
ext2.cfg:
\verbatim
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = ext2
GENERATE_TAGFILE = ext2/ext2.tag
\endverbatim
\htmlonly
Go to the <a href="faq.html">next</a> section or return to the
<a href="index.html">index</a>.
\endhtmlonly
*/