Javadoc comments stripped out

> I noticed that all my javadoc comments were stripped out of all the

> functions in my migrated code. Is there any way that the comments

> can be left in?

Unfortunately, comments outside of method bodies are today a bit of a

problem. The reason is that comments aren't well-defined lexical

structures--they can occur anywhere, even in the middle of expressions, and

they have no lexical relation to anything in the source code. Because of

the way our JavaCC-generated Java parser works, comments are not presented

as normal tokens, but are instead a "sideband" of information associated

with the first normal token after their occurrence.

Unfortunately, because we are transforming the JavaCC parse tree into an XML

document tree, the comments would need to be parented by the XML node they

are associated with, which would require a bunch of node acrobatics to make

happen. We dropped this from the 1.0 release because it was a lot of work

for potentially only a few customers, and we didn't want to hold up the

release for it (few customers Javadoc their ND methods). We didn't hear

anything about it since the 1.0 release, and therefore it didn't make it on

the priority list for the 1.1 release either. This is actually the first

time we've heard anything about it.

At this time, there is no general workaround. However, if your Javadoc is

primarily in ND user module classes, you can safely remove these from your

project before migration and then copy them over to the migrated application

afterward. The iMT doesn't do anything but change the package name for user

modules, so this should be easy. Skipping the trip through the iMT's

application description will let you keep the comments (and formatting) of

the original file.

Todd

Guest at 2007-7-1 16:30:09 >