How to make Qt Creator to show pop-up documentation of my functions the same way it does for the functions from the Qt library?

Question

When you place the mouse pointer over any Qt function/class it shows a pop-up with short description of what it does, taken from the docs in the comment above the function/class.

For my functions/classes I have documentation in the doxygen format:

/**
  Returns foo
*/
QString getFoo() {
  return "foo";
}

When this function is used, I want to view the same type of pop-up with my docs when the mouse pointer is over the function name.

Is it possible to do that with Qt Creator?

Answer 1

Unfortunately it's not possible for Qt Creator (as of the recently release 2.4) to pick up the tags on-the-fly. However, what might work is to let doxygen run, and tell it to create qch files. If you register the created qch file, you should get mouse-over and even a proper help file. See http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Integrating+API+documentation+into+Qt+Creator+Help for how Ogre3D does it. YMMV if that's worth it for a fast-changing project. It's certainly a good idea for a (semi-)stable library.

Relevant bug report: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTCREATORBUG-4557

Answer 2

Qt Creator requires the generated docs to have some special markers in order to retrieve the tooltip text. I couldn't find a way to insert these markers with Doxygen so I've created a simple script to do it:

https://github.com/mmmarcos/doxygen2qtcreator

It's not bulletproof but it allows us to integrate our classes and methods briefs into Qt Creator tooltips.