The Documentation Generation Process
For the benefit of the users, the basic steps needed to produce documentation out of TTCN-3 source files will be briefly described to provide some insight into the documentation generation process.
The documentation generation process involves several steps. These can be summarized as follows:
- Process the input TTCN-3 files and gather the necessary information, which results in
- Generate and validate XML files containing all the extracted information, which is the basis for
- Transform the generated XML files into the desired output format(s)
In more detail, step 1. includes parsing and analysis of the input TTCN-3 files. A user has little influence on this stage. The information collected during the analysis stage of step 1. is then in step 2. exported as XML files in the output path (by default named project.xml, import.xml, and dependencies.xml). The XML files are validated using XML Schema Documents (XSD) (stored by default under $T3D_HOME/xsd/). Finally, in step 3. the generated XML files are transformed with the help of the XSLT files into the target documents.
Step 3 is of most interest to the user, since it allows flexible and customizable transformation in just about any format. Currently only HTML format is available, but PDF- and TeX output, for example, are possible as well.
In the HTML generation process, the above mentioned CSS and JS files are involved, as well as the XSLT files for HTML transformations (by default located in {$T3D_HOME}/xslt/html.xsl and {$T3D_HOME}/xslt/html_import.xsl. The XSLT files for HTML transformations include all the necessary transformation steps to produce the desired HTML output. It may of course be further customized to accommodate user / project specific needs. The default XSLT files serve generally as a reference. Note that modification of these files requires a certain level of knowledge of the underlying technologies and improper modifications may result in documentation generation failures, therefore one should proceed with caution. For further information about technical details related to the customization of XSLT files, please refer to the technical documentation.
