Imagix Corp
Documentation for
existing software

Document
Generation

 As a software developer, one of your least desirable and least rewarding tasks is writing documention for your own software. It's dull, unimaginative work. Usually you put it off until the end of a project, and by then you're exhausted from your tight deadlines. And you don't get much benefit yourself, since you already understand your own code.

Yet, when you need to support or reuse someone else's software, all too often you find your job made more difficult by the poor job that the original developers did in documenting their code.

Research indicates that 5% to 15% of development effort goes into software documentation. By automating portions of this task, you can save significant effort, get more accurate documents, and avoid some genuinely unpleasant work.
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  • Automated Document Generation
  • Graph Export
Imagix 4D can automatically generate comprehensive as-built documents, for either your own software, or for code that you've inherited.

Using information in the Imagix 4D database and in the source code itself, the tool thoroughly documents each component (file, class, function, etc.) in the software. You get accurate, up-to-date design documents with minimal effort.

Imagix 4D can output the documentation in three formats - HTML, RTF and ASCII.

Contents of HTML output include:
  • Lookup indices of all symbols
  • Clickable xref graphs
  • Flow charts for functions
  • User selected metrics
  • Members tables for files and classes
  • Symbol usage tables
  • Symbol dependency tables
  • Clickable source code snippets
  • Clickable file listings
  • User controlled contents and formatting
Once you've analyzed a specific aspect of your software and created a graph which displays the relevant structure and dependencies, you can save the graph as a bookmark in order to return to it later. But you may also want to export the graph in order to archive or share it.

In addition to direct output to a printer, Imagix 4D provides a number of alternative formats for exporting the graph to a file. With most formats, image size, background color, and conversion to grayscale can be controlled.

File formats include:
  • png for import into on-line documents
  • ps/eps for import into word processors
  • vdx and csv for import into Microsoft Visio
  • txt (for certain graphs) for post-processing