Working with Embedded Wizard: Extracting project documentation

Embedded Wizard is able to automatically extract from your project the available documentation and to store it as a single help file in Microsoft format CHM (Compiled Help Module). This feature is as such a useful supplement if you want to share your development with other members of your team or your customer expects the software being delivered with the corresponding documentation.

During the documentation extraction Embedded Wizard evaluates your project and the dependencies between all project members. Knowing this information and the description you have eventually specified for the members, Embedded Wizard generates chapters describing individual project members as well as the relations between them presented in inheritance and class diagrams. Hyperlinks permit the user to navigate conveniently in the resulting document. The following screenshot demonstrates how the generated documentation looks like:

Description attribute

The resulting documentation is built from the relations existing between project members and the individually specified member description. Almost every project member exposes the attribute Description. The text you enter in this attribute is automatically taken over into the resulting document. Thus it is essential to provide description for your project members in order to obtain documentation with reasonable quality.

Start documentation extraction

To start the documentation extraction select in the menu Build the command Extract documentation .... Thereupon the Extract documentation dialog appears where you can configure and start the operation.

View and deploy the documentation

To view the generated CHM files you need the Microsoft HTML Help viewer. Usually, the viewer is installed with other Microsoft applications, like Visual Studio. If the application is not available on your Windows system, please visit www.microsoft.com to download it.

The generated document appears automatically just at the end of the documentation extraction. Later, you can view the documentation by simply opening the CHM file in the Windows File Explorer. Usually the CHM files are stored in the subfolder HtmlDoc just below your project folder. To deploy the documentation to your team members or your customer it is sufficient to provide them the CHM file.