README.md

Documentation

The documentation of itowns is available on the itowns website: http://www.itowns-project.org/itowns/docs/

Writing documentation

The documentation is composed of two parts: the API reference, and tutorials.

API reference

The API reference is written in the source of itowns, using JSDoc, along with support for the Markdown syntax. This is a classic documentation, explaining all exposed methods and classes in itowns, and some internal others.

When documenting something, don't forget to check the presence of your file inside docs/config.json.

If the file you are editing is not present, add it to the navigation list, in the correct package.

How to document a class

A typical class should have the following documenting parts:

/**
 * @classdesc
 * The description of the class.
 *
 * @property {type} prop - Description of a property of the class.
 * @property {type} prop2 - Description of another property of the class.
 */
class AClass {
    /**
     * @param - Description of the parameter.
     *
     * @constructor
     */
    constructor() {}

    /**
     * Description and explanation of the method.
     *
     * @param {type} param - Description of the parameter.
     *
     * @return {type} The returned value.
     */
    method() {}
}

If you are not sure about a tag, a reviewer will tell you what to use in your pull request.

Tutorials

Tutorials don't use JSDoc, but rather Markdown. Note that some JSDoc tags are still working inside Markdown in our case.

When adding a tutorial, also add it in docs/tutorials/list.json, and following the already present tutorials, add a name to it.

You will also need to specify the section of your tutorial in docs/config.json, at the tutorialSections property. You can add a new section as long as the sectionTitle and sectionId parameters you set for your tutorial are different from the ones that are already present.

If you want to add images to the tutorial, add them inside docs/tutorials/images, and name under $TUTORIAL_NAME_xxx, $TUTORIAL_NAME being the name of the markdown file containing the tutorial, and xxx the number of the picture.

Generating documentation

Make sure all dependencies are installed (do a npm install if not), and simply run this command:

npm run doc

The generation process should take less than 5 seconds, and result in the creation of a out/ folder in docs/.

Consulting the documentation locally

The documentation can't be viewed without a server, as it uses XHR requests to make the link between the navigation and the content.

If you have npm start running, you can browse the documentation at http://localhost:8080/docs/out/.

Otherwise, if you have another server running that can serve the itowns directory, you can go in $YOUR_SERVER/$ITOWNS_PATH/docs/out and it should be here, with $YOUR_SERVER and $ITOWNS_PATH to replace by a working value given your configuration.

Modifying the template

If you wish to modify the current template, there are multiple things to change:

• docs/static/styles/ contains the CSS styles of the template
• docs/tmpl/ contains the templates of each part
• publish.js and templateHelper.js define the generation process of the documentation from the template

The architecture of the template follows roughly the one from JSDoc.