What is the approach to include other properties in the documentation

[obfischer]

I am evaluating the Spring Configuration Property Documenter and it works well. Although our application has a lot of properties to configure, which are required from Spring itself and components, provided by Spring. These properties are not included in any of my configuration classes.

What is the best way to include them in the generated documentation?

[nandorholozsnyak]

Hello @obfischer ,

I'm so sorry to reply so late, I got no notification or just missed it. Let me think about it and come back to you with that soon.

[nandorholozsnyak]

Hello @obfischer ,

I'm back with some news. I thought about your question so much before I started the project, and the whole file location techniques and the ability to add multiple input files for the generate-and-aggregate-documents goal has been already created.

Let me show you an example how you can utilize it:

<execution>
      <id>aggregate-docs-markdown-with-spring-related-configurations</id>
      <goals>
          <goal>generate-and-aggregate-documents</goal>
      </goals>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <configuration>
          <type>ADOC</type>
          <inputs>
              <input>
                  <name>Multi Module A</name>
                  <description>Multi Module A properties with a folder input</description>
                  <input>../multi-module-a</input>
              </input>
              <input>
                  <name>Sprint Boot 2.7.8</name>
                  <description>Sprint Boot 2.7.8 related properties</description>
                  <input>${user.home}/.m2/repository/org/springframework/boot/spring-boot/2.7.8/spring-boot-2.7.8.jar</input>
              </input>
              <input>
                  <name>Multi Module C</name>
                  <description>Multi Module C properties with a specific file input</description>
                  <input>../multi-module-c/target/classes/META-INF/spring-configuration-metadata.json</input>
              </input>
          </inputs>
          <outputFile>target/with-spring-related-stuff.adoc</outputFile>
      </configuration>
  </execution>

In this XML snippet, you can see that there are at least 3 ways to refer a metadata json file:

1. Point it to a folder and it will search for it in given directories (in case of maven plugin the list is here: https://github.com/rodnansol/spring-configuration-property-documenter/blob/master/spring-configuration-property-documenter-core/src/main/java/org/rodnansol/core/project/maven/MavenProject.java#L68)
2. A JAR/ZIP file can be refered and in this case the metadata JSON file will be searched in at the META-INF/spring-configuration-metadata.json path, and for our luck, most of the Spring Boot related configurations can be found here, so you can link any amount of spring jar files and you can include them in your final output.
3. A single spring-configuration-metadata.json can be linked, this is basically straightforward.

For more information please check this documentation section: https://github.com/rodnansol/spring-configuration-property-documenter/blob/master/docs/maven-plugin.adoc#multi-module

In this case, the final document will contains all 3 inputs in the order they were specified.

One thing for sure, the Spring Boot based JSON files are full of with properties, and you are not able to just include or exclude specific keys (YET, because a few weeks back this idea was born, I planned it for the 0.3.0 release, but due to lack of time, I was not able to make the implementation, but right now it is at least created as an issue and you can follow its progress here: #39)

If you have time, please try it out and let me know about your experiences, if you have additional questions please feel free to ask, I will be paying more attention to my notifications on the topic :)

[nandorholozsnyak]

Hello @obfischer

With the release of the 0.4.0 version (https://github.com/rodnansol/spring-configuration-property-documenter/releases/tag/v0.4.0) property groups and simple properties can be excluded from the final document and the list can be configured in the Maven plugin setup. I hope it can help you deal with bigger metadata json files.

Sample configuration can be found here:
https://github.com/rodnansol/spring-configuration-property-documenter/blob/master/samples/multi-module/multi-module-docs/pom.xml#L245

[nandorholozsnyak]

I'm closing this discussion, let me know if you need more information about the topic, the two earlier comments are still relevant.