I want Eclipse to automatically generate Javadoc comments for my getter and setter methods based on the previously defined comments for the fields. How can I achieve this?
Background: A policy in our company is to comment every method and field (even if they have self-explanatory names). So I have to do redundant work by describing the fields and describing the getters / setters again.
Example:
/**
* name of the dynamic strategy
*/
private String dynName;
/**
* get the name of the dynamic strategy
* @return
*/
public String getDynName() {
return dynName;
}
Searching the web showed that I’m not the only one with the problem – but I couldn’t find any solutions. I checked out http://jautodoc.sourceforge.net/ but seems like it is not capable of doing this.
I finally found a solution (or at least a workaround) myself. I read about Spoon on SO. It’s an Java program processor which allows to read and modify java source files. It can even be used as Eclipse Plugin or Ant/Maven script.
Everything you have to do, is to extend the AbstractProcessor, which will process a method. If
the method name starts with get/set it looks for the corresponding field, extracts its comment and replaces or extends the accessors comment with it.
I have a little ant script, which takes all my sources and processes them.
Something integrated in eclipses code templates would be of course more convenient, but for now this way is ok!