Question

I’d like to write my Javadoc comments once for each field and access the exiting field’s Javadoc in the getter and setter methods.

I know there’s the {@inheritDoc} tag for referencing the parent method’s documentation, but I want to include the documentation of a field, which of course is not a parent method.

Is it possible to “don’t repeat yourself” with Javadoc?

Answer 1

Other than @see, not sure how.

But if you’re generating internal documentation, you don’t really need to document the getters/setters. If you’re generating external documentation, you wouldn’t document private properties anyway.

(Truth be told, at one point I had a rather spectacular set of scripts/etc. that would process Java source code and do magical things like this due to various limitations in the Java tool chain. I gave it up some time ago now that IDEs are much better, but there are some things, like weaving multiple files into single classes and whatnot that were really handy. Sort of like fake mixins, some doc magic, etc.)

(Actually, the Spoon project linked to is pretty similar to what I was doing, but pre-1.5.)