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Inner workings

Inner workings#

Doxysphinx is a click cli application.

Entry#

The main entrypoint to doxysphinx is the cli module and the commands defined in it:

  • build (which builds the rst files for doxygen)

  • clean (which removes any file created from doxysphinx)

These commands take the sphinx_source_directory the sphinx_output_directory and at least one doxygen config file (doxyfile) as input to do their work.

1000 ft view#

During build command doxysphinx follows these steps:

  • A builder is created (for now there’s only one Builder. But in the future there may be more)

  • This builder represents the whole rst generation/building process which has these phases:

    • Resource Provisioning:

      In this step html resources (images, stylesheets, javascript files etc.) are copied to the output directory and adapted. The input and output directories are mapped with the help of a DirectoryMapper.

    • Building Rst Files:

      Each HTML file found in the doxygen output is parsed (with a HtmlParser) and written to an rst file (with a Writer).

100 ft view#

Overview#

../_images/inner_workings_segmentation_overview.svg

Process#

  1. Doxygen html output is parsed. This is implemented in DoxygenHtmlParser. The Parser will parse load the html file, do some processing (it will extract some metadata and change <pre>- and <verbatim>-tags into more generic <rst>-tags) and creates a HtmlParseResult that contains the metadata and the processed DOM as an etree.

  2. For each doxygen html file a rst file is created based on the following rules (see RstWriter.write(...)):

    • If the html file doesn’t contain any rst documentation blocks an rst with a raw include directive is written. This will directly put the html file into the output (but with sphinx templating/toc etc. “around”).

    • If the html file contains at least one \rst (or @rst) documentation element it is “splitted” at these rst documentation snippets. For each html segment a raw html directive with the html as content is then written and each rst segment is written directly.

    • The rst files are written in parallel to the html files with the same name but the rst suffix instead of the html suffix.

    • The RstWriter will also create a toctree for some rsts based on the DoxygenTocGenerator implementation.

  3. When sphinx processes these rst files it will render the results as html to it’s own output directory thereby keeping the original file name which means that all doxygen internal links stay intact.

Additional notes#

  • As the sphinx raw html directive isn’t considering resources (css, images, javascript-files etc.) these files are copied to the output directory if they are newer (this is done at the beginning of the process) - see DoxygenResourceProvider.

  • In the ResourceProvider we also patch the doxygen.css file via libsass to scope it below a special div-element (()) and add some extra css rules which change some theme css styles. For the scoping see CssScoper.

10 ft view#

Hey, if read this far you have to be a developer - Just fire up your IDE and look into the code 😊.

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