Importing external apexdocs for managed packages

[Gobius Dolhain]

IC2 has a way to display the docs from developer.salesforce.com with ctrl+q

Is there or could there be a way to inject our own apexdocs with an external provider for types and classes from managed packages?

We need some kind of way to export and import documentation declarations.

[Scott Wells]

Unfortunately there's not a way to extract ApexDoc for identifiers from managed packages. You can use ApexDoc on your own classes for which source is available, but I don't think that's what your asking. And I'm not at a point right now where I can provide supported extension points for Illuminated Cloud to allow for an external documentation provider. Sorry...

[Jason van Beukering]

Hi Scott, based on the great work you’ve done around generating HTML based documentation from ApexDocs; could we look at a feature where we bind the generated docs to symbols from a managed package (installed into an Org) in the same way you make Salesforce Standard Symbols documentation available with the IDE?

[Scott Wells]

It wouldn’t be the same way that it works with the Salesforce standard symbols as those are actually “scraped” from the Salesforce docs once per-seasonal release with a well-defined understanding of how those docs are structured. It would be more like how IntelliJ IDEA allows you to add source to third-party libraries that are otherwise only referenced as binary jars, and it then uses the source when you try to reference any symbol from those libraries. So you would still need to be able to tell IC2 where the source files are for the installed managed package. At least that’s how I’ve been thinking about it so far. Trying to make it handle arbitrary URL and internal anchor structures of generated ApexDoc would be a no-go. Or are you asking specifically about documentation generated by IcApexDoc where I’m obviously much more familiar with the resulting URL/anchor structure?

[Jason van Beukering]

Hi. Scott, I was indeed referring to the structure of IcApexDoc as input…. The issue with including the source (say for a managed package) is that its not necessarily open source and we’re using managed packages to protect our IP (amongst other things)….

[Scott Wells]

Got it. Makes sense. That’s a bit different from the other use case which was the developer of multiple packages wanting to treat dependencies as packages even during dev but have more access to the source, docs, etc. Yours is the ISV use case of wanting to deliver the published interface of a package with docs linked in the IDE. Let me chew on that one a bit and see if I can come up with a solution that works not just for IcApexDoc but ideally for a more general URL/anchor pattern as well if possible.