Question

When I generate javadoc for my Android project in Eclipse, there are lots of warnings like

cannot find symbol
symbol  : class TextView

and

warning - Tag @see: reference not found: android.app.Dialog

I also tried

-link http://developer.android.com/reference/
-link http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/

in Extra javadoc options (path names with white spaces must be enclosed in quotes) tab in Configure Javadoc Arguments (3rd dialog of eclipse->project->Generate Javadoc).

But only -link http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/ is working i.e for String class
link http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html?is-external=true is generated. but for android.app.Dialog , no link is generated.

Edit

I also tried selecting android.jar in Select referenced archives and projects to which links should be generated
tab in Configure Javadoc arguments for standard doclet (2nd dialog of eclipse->project->Generate Javadoc),
but this creates local links to docs in local android-sdk directory, NOT the online Android references like it does for Java APIs.

Answer 1

Javadoc relies on a file called package-list to determine what Java packages are documented below a given directory. For some reason, such a file is missing for http://d.android.com/reference/, therefore the “naive” approach with

-link http://d.android.com/reference/

doesn’t work – you get a warning that the package-list could not be retrieved and no links are generated into your docs. (Note: The checkboxes in that 2nd eclipse dialog just assemble -link parameters for you, so that doesn’t really make any difference)

However, Javadoc offers the -linkoffline parameter to be able to adjust for precisely this situation: You want to link to some other Javadoc documentation online, but you cannot access it at the time of generating your own docs. Here’s how it works: While -link takes only one parameter (the URL of the JavaDoc docs you want to link to), -linkoffline takes a second one. That one is the location of the package-list file!

So, to link to the online Android reference documentation, you should not select any checkboxes in the 2nd eclipse dialog, but instead add

-linkoffline http://d.android.com/reference file:/C:/pathtoyour/android-sdk-windows/docs/reference

in the Extra Javadoc options in the 3rd dialog. That way you use the package-list of your locally installed Android docs, but the links in your generated Javadoc will still point to the online version anyway.

Hope it helps!