RPGLEDOC - Document Procedure and Program Calls

Modern RPG applications consist of a multitude of subprocedures and programs - a lot more than there were in the traditional RPG applications. Although modern tools, such as the outline view in Remote System Explorer, can provide me with a list of callable subprocedures and programs, they cannot tell me exactly what the subprocedure/program does, what the possible values are for parameters or what the possible return values are.

Which leads to that terrible four lettered word - documentation. Yes, it all has to be documented and we all know how much RPG programmers like to write documentation.

This is a problem which has already been tackled in Java, PHP and other languages. JavaDoc and PHPDoc offer a facility whereby programmers put special comments in their code and a command is used to scan the code and generate documentation web pages from the comments.

Can the JavaDoc approach be used in RPG? By applying a few terms and conditions, of course it can. Why not check out what it looks like using CGIDEV2 or, if you prefer using PHP.

RPGLEDOC comes in two parts - a set of programs to generate the RPGLEDOC documentation and examples of how you might view the contents of the documentation using either CGIDEV2 or PHP.

Each of the downloads is a zip file containing a directory. Each directory contains a READ_ME document which contains details on how to install and use the programs

• Download RPGLEDOC Documentation Generator
• Download RPGLEDOC Documentation Viewers

Please not that these are not supported products - the source of the programs is included and you are free to chop and change them as you wish (see standard disclaimer below). Of course, if you come across any bugs please let us know

Corrections

July 17, 2010. Thanks to Jeff Campbell for the following corrections to a few (ahem) features in the programs RP002A, RP003A and RP005A. And my apologies for the length of time it has taken me to get them posted

• When validation is turned on, there is an incorrect message that the number of parameters documented was not the same as the number of parameters in the prototype.
• The size of data structures and the size of the data structure subfields were not being set for data structures with the DIM keyword
• The size of data structures and the size of the data structure subfields were not being set for data structures with long names

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