Generating Documentation and Modifying the sTeam-REST API

sTeam REST API

GSoC2016Logofever_logoFOSSASIA bring’s people together to share, create, develop and make things with Open Technologies and software. We organize science hack labs, Open Tech events, meetups and coding programs with developers, designers and contributors.
Checkout the FOSSASIA Idea’s page for more information.
(ˢᵒᶜⁱᵉᵗʸserver) aims to be a platform for developing collaborative applications.
sTeam server project repository: sTeam.
sTeam-REST API repository: sTeam-REST

Documentation

Documentation is an important part of software engineering. Types of documentation include:

  1. Requirements – Statements that identify attributes, capabilities, characteristics, or qualities of a system. This is the foundation for what will be or has been implemented.
  2. Architecture/Design – Overview of software. Includes relations to an environment and construction principles to be used in design of software components.
  3. Technical – Documentation of code, algorithms, interfaces, and APIs.
  4. End user – Manuals for the end-user, system administrators and support staff.
  5. Marketing – How to market the product and analysis of the market demand.

Doxygen

Doxygen is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources, but it also supports other popular programming languages such as C, Objective-C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, IDL (Corba, Microsoft, and UNO/OpenOffice flavors), Fortran, VHDL, Tcl, and to some extent D.
The Doxygen treats files of other languages as C/C++ and creates documentation for it accordingly.
sTeam documentation was tried to be created with the doxygen. But empty documentation was created due to the lack of the doxygen annotations used in the project.
 Doxygen doc generation.
DoxyGenTerminal
Doxygen Docs
DoxyDoc
The next way to create documentation was to make use of the autodoc utility provided by the Pike. The utility to generate docs was provided in the later versions of the Pike(>=8.0.155).
The autodoc files are generated and  later these are converted into  html pages. The commands used for generating the autodoc include:-
pike -x extract_autodoc /source
pike -x autodoc_to_html /src /opfile
The autodoc_to_html utility converts a single autodoc file to an html page. As a result a shell script was written to convert all the generated autodoc files to the html file.
docGenerator.sh
#!/bin/bash  

shopt -s globstar  
for filename in ./**/*.pike.xml; do  
    outputFile=doc/${filename#./}  
    outputFile=${outputFile%.xml}."html"  
    if [ -d $(dirname "./"$outputFile) ]; then  
      touch "./"$outputFile  
    else  
      mkdir -p $(dirname "./"$outputFile) && touch "./"$outputFile  
    fi  
    pike -x autodoc_to_html $filename "./"$outputFile  
done

Autodoc Documentation
AutoDocThe documentation generated by this was less informative and lacked the referrals to other classes and headers. The societyserver project was developed long back but the autodoc utility was introduced in the later versions of pike. As a result the source files lacked the autodoc tags which are required to generate a well informative documentation with bindings to other files.

Restructuring the sTeam-REST API

The sTeam-REST API project made use of the angular-seed to initiate the development during the early phases. However these files still existed in the project. This had lead to a pandemonium and created difficulty in understanding the project. The files had to be removed and the app was in dire need of a restructuring. The following issues have been reported and resolved.

Issue.Github IssueGithub PR
sTeam-REST IssuesIssuesPR

The new UI can be seen below.

Home

Home

Register

Register

About

About

Testing the REST API

The functionality to run the tests using the npm test command was added to the project. Now the user can run the tests using these commands instead of the traditional approach of running the tests using jasmine-node and specifying the test directory. The domain name of the urls to which the request was sent was changed. The e2e tests and frisby tests were conducted successfully.

e2e Tests.

e2eTests

Frisby Tests

NPM tests

The next step would be to do add more tests for the REST API.

Feel free to explore the repository. Suggestions for improvements are welcomed.

Leave a Reply