[Lazarus] Duplicate items in xml doc files

Werner Pamler werner.pamler at freenet.de
Tue Dec 17 22:52:49 CET 2019


Fixing a docs-related issue today 
(https://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=36452), I noticed that the 
entry for TCanvas.PolyBezier almost does not have any elements when the 
item is displayed in the *FPDoc editor* of Lazarus, i.e. I do "View" > 
"FPDoc Editor" and place the cursor in the normal source code window on 
the PolyBezier identifier - then the FPDoc editor displays only the 
"short" text, all other tabs are empty. On the other hand, the full chm 
file contains a lot more information 
(https://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.io/docs/lcl/graphics/tcanvas.polybezier.html), 
among it the description node which is the topic of that bug report.

How is this possible?

On the other hand, opening the file graphics.xml in the *LazDocEditor 
*and finding the TCanvas node shows two PolyBezier nodes. The first one 
contains the text from the chm file, the second one has subnodes for the 
parameters of the function - there is no text assigned to them, but some 
of them are listed twice.

There are other help items which show the same phenomenon: Chord, 
Polygon, PolyLine, RadialPie, where Polygon even has three entries!

Is this correct? If yes it is at least very confusing and makes the 
LazDocEditor possibly a dangerous tool because the xml file might be 
damaged when text is added to the wrong node.

Can both tools, FPDoc Editor and LazDocEditor, be used to edit help 
information? Or is it recommended to do this manually (which is 
extremely error-prone)?

And why are there so many empty lines? If they were added by either 
FPDocEditor or LazDocEditor (and not by the author manually) then these 
tools do not look very mature.

Probably related: the source code mouse-over hint of PolyBezier shows 
only the "short" text, not the full "description".

Werner

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