Sanjiv Jivan's Blog

searchable javadocs

Javadocs are good but not great as they miss a key feature of being able to do a full text search across not only the method names but also the actual doc content.

This morning a read about a really neat tool called Documancer from Abhijeet's blog. This tool essentially allows you to point to the index.html Javadoc file of a given library and one can then run full text searches through the Javadocs.

To test drive this, I decided to try the tool against the GWT-Ext Javadocs. Here are the steps involved

Download and install Documancer from here Now launch Documancer and go to "Settings --> Manage Books". Then Click the "New" button and enter the name of the book. A "book" is nothing but a name for the library as you can have javadocs for multiple libraries added as "books" to Documancer. Select HTML as the content provider and point to the Javadocs index.html for the title page. Make sure you check the "Enable full text search for this book" option.

Documancer now goes through the javadocs and indexes it. It uses Apache Lucene under the hoods for indexing and the Gecko engine to display the javadocs. Once this gets complete, you can view the Javadocs as you normally do in a browser. However you can now also carry out full text searches and add bookmarks

Pretty cool!! It would be great if this tool supported reading Javadocs from jars too, and building a library of "books" by pointing it to a maven repository. I'm a big IntelliJ IDEA fan and hopefully this feature makes it natively into IntelliJ.

Posted by sjivan ( Apr 15 2008, 02:25:50 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [2]