How to document Visual Basic with Doxygen

Question

I am trying to use some Doxygen filter for Visual Basic in Windows.

I started with Vsevolod Kukol filter, based on gawk. There are not so many directions. So I started using his own commented VB code VB6Module.bas and, by means of his vbfilter.awk, I issued:

gawk -f vbfilter.awk VB6Module.bas  

This outputs a C-like code on stdin. Therefore I redirected it to a file with:

gawk -f vbfilter.awk VB6Module.bas>awkout.txt

I created this Doxygen test.cfg file:

PROJECT_NAME      = "Test"
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY  = test
GENERATE_LATEX    = NO
GENERATE_MAN      = NO
GENERATE_RTF      = NO
CASE_SENSE_NAMES  = NO
INPUT             = awkout.txt
QUIET             = NO
JAVADOC_AUTOBRIEF = NO
SEARCHENGINE      = NO

To produce the documentation I issued:

doxygen test.cfg 

Doxygen complains as the "name 'VB6Module.bas' supplied as the second argument in the \file statement is not an input file." I removed the comment @file VB6Module.bas from awkout.txt. The warning stopped, but in both cases the documentation produced was just a single page with the project name.

I tried also the alternative filter by Basti Grembowietz in Python vbfilter.py. Again without documentation, again producing errors and without any useful output.

Answer 1

After trials and errors I solved the problem.

I was unable to convert a .bas file in a format such that I can pass it to Doxygen as input. Anyway, following @doxygen user suggestions, I was able to create a Doxygen config file such that it can interpret the .bas file comments properly.

Given the file VB6Module.bas (by the Doxygen-VB-Filter author, Vsevolod Kukol), commented with Doxygen style adapted for Visual Basic, I wrote the Doxygen config file, test.cfg, as follows:

PROJECT_NAME      = "Test"
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY  = test
GENERATE_LATEX    = NO
GENERATE_MAN      = NO
GENERATE_RTF      = NO
CASE_SENSE_NAMES  = NO
INPUT             = readme.md VB6Module.bas
QUIET             = YES
JAVADOC_AUTOBRIEF = NO
SEARCHENGINE      = NO
FILTER_PATTERNS   = "*.bas=vbfilter.bat"

where:

• readme.md is any Markdown file that can used as the main documentation page.

• vbfilter.bat contains:

  @echo off gawk.exe -f vbfilter.awk "%1%"

• vbfilter.awk by the filter author is assumed to be in the same folder as the input files to be documented and obviously gawk should be in the path.

Running:

doxygen test.cfg 

everything is smooth, apart two apparently innocuous warnings:

gawk: vbfilter.awk:528: warning: escape sequence `\[' treated as plain `[' 
gawk: vbfilter.awk:528: warning: escape sequence `\]' treated as plain `]' 

Now test\html\index.html contains the proper documentation as extracted by the ".bas" and the Markdown files.