我们可以制作 JavaDoc 工具来解析方法内的注释吗？

Question

I tried googling this question a lot but could not find the answer to exact question. I also read this question: Does the javadoc tool recognize comments inside methods?

So my question is kind-of a follow-up to this. I know that default JavaDoc tool would simple ignore any javadoc comments inside methods, but can we somehow make it read those comments too and may be try handling them on our customer doclets/ taglets? I tried writing my own doclet and taglet as well but since JavaDoc would completely ignore the comments inside methods, I could not succeed.

For example, suppose I have the following code:

public void methodX() {
        /**
         * @MyTag This is a sample javadoc comment with custom tag
         */
    }

Is there a way to make JavaDoc not ignore the comment inside methodX? I could handle the response in a custom doclet if javadoc could parse and provide the comment text.

Reason to try this: I guess it would be helpful to know why I'm looking for such a requirement. Basically we have a lot of configuration driven coding where these configurations are stored in DB (So that we could simply change the configuration at runtime without having to go through the BRD process again). So we are planning to document those configurations at a central place. And instead of keeping the code and document separate, we also think it would be wise to keep the documentation closer to code itself so that any code updations could also possibly update the documentation. Publishing to central place can be taken care of via doclets/ taglets but only if JavaDoc could read those comments inside methods.

So is there a possibility of making JavaDoc tool read through comments inside methods as well? Or else we would have to try and write our own comments parser similar to JavaDoc for this.

Answer 1

So I did a little digging around and seeing that no-one has answered the question, it seems people are (maybe) not sure about the possibility.

Based on what I found, it doesn't seem feasible to have the JavaDoc tool parse the comments inside methods. The reason being, JavaDoc doesn't even get those comment texts to parse . Now, what I mean here is, JavaDoc relies on the JDK compiler (the API of-course) to have the Java code converted into tokens and trees and then gets all the comments from there. So unless you are okay modifying the JDK compiler itself to make it "Do Not Ignore" the comments inside methods, you can't make JavaDoc to read comments inside method.

Oh! And for the part of solving our problem, we're, for now, restricting to define JavaDocs with custom Tags for the constants we used and have the comments processed via a Custom Taglet to handle the new Tags.