API and Javadoc

OpenAnnotate uses JSDoc for source code documentation.

Generating updated documentation

To generate updated documentation, first make sure you have the OpenAnnotate source pulled down. If you don't yet have the source, please read Building and Deploying OpenAnnotate for setting up your local development environment.

To use JSDoc, you first need to install it through npm. To do so, open a command prompt in the root directory of your local copy of OpenAnnotate and run the following command:

npm install

Once you've installed JSDoc, navigate to the following location: OA_ROOT\node_modules\.bin. Inside that directory there is a jsdoc.cmd file that can be run to generate the documentation. Open a command prompt in this directory and run the following command:

jsdoc -p -R ../../jsdoc/README.md -c ../../jsdoc/conf/conf.json -d ../../jsdoc/out

For more information on what all the command line arguments above mean and for a full list of options, read http://usejsdoc.org/about-commandline.html.

After running the above command, all the documentation will be generated in the form of HTML pages in the OA_ROOT/jsdoc/out directory. An index.html page will exist in that directory which can be opened in a browser to view the generated documentation.