How can I debug a Doclet in Eclipse?

Question

I am creating a custom doclet that I want to run in my Maven build with the Javadoc plugin, but right now I'd like to test / debug the Doclet in Eclipse. How can I do that?

Do I have to invoke javadoc programmatically? And how?

Answer 1

you can simply create a main method in your doclet and call (example, see full cmdling reference):

public class MyDoclet extends Doclet {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        com.sun.tools.javadoc.Main.execute("-doclet " + MyDoclet.class.getName());
    }
}

That also works with the debugger.

You might also have to add the -classpath parameter containing all jar dependencies needed to parse the actual code.

Answer 2

If you are running JDK v1.8, you may need to use the following code snippet:

Main.execute(docletFqcn.getClass().getClassLoader(), "-doclet", docletFqcn, javaSourceFilePath);

where docletFqcn is the fully qualified class name of your Doclet class and javaSourceFilePath the location of the Java file to process.