DocFlex Together

DocFlextor for Together is a new powerful template-driven documentation generator for Borland® Together® based on DocFlex Technology developed by Filigris Works.

It is prepared in the form of a Together plug-in which installs itself in the Together IDE and allows to generate the superior quality documentation by Together projects and models in HTML, RTF and TXT output formats.

The software is available in two edition:

1. DocFlex/Together -- The Full Edition
2. DocFlex/Together (Lite)

The high quality graphic Template Designer included in the Full Edition allows to design your custom templates and may be both invoked from the Together IDE and launched as a separate Java application.

The Lite Edition includes only the template interpreter (generator). The basic templates are built into the executable Java library as resources. So, you can use this package simply as a high quality documentation generator for Borland® Together® without thinking much about how all this internally works. The Lite Edition is distributed in shareware mode. That means, some features are for free, others are unlocked with the full license.

Both editions are available for downloads now at:
http://www.filigris.com/downloads/

Find more information about DocFlex/Together at:
http://www.filigris.com/products/docflex_together/

See also examples and screenshots of the generated documentation:
http://www.filigris.com/products/docflex_together/examples/

Technical Requirements

Borland® Together® ControlCenter™ or Solo, version 6.x or 5.x installed on your system.
Running the Template Designer as a separate application requires Java^TM 2 JRE 1.4.x or JRE 1.3.x.

Key Features

• Represents Together models in the form similar to XML documents and allows to process information from them basing on universal concepts of XML and approaches developed around it (such as XPath).

• Provides advanced data querying and sorting capabilities comparable with those of XSL Transformations (and possibly even beyond).

• The high quality graphic Template Designer allows to visually design the sophisticated formatting of the generated documentation basing on abstract layout concepts such as flow of text, paragraphs, tables and lists and any combinations of them.

  Since all such layouts in one or another form are supported by any modern output format (such as HTML, RTF, PDF, XSL-FO and so on), the formatting specified in the DocFlex template can be rendered with the high precision in any of those formats. (Currently, the supported output formats include HTML and RTF. Other formats are planned in next versions, XSL-FO in the first place).

  Another opportunity provided by this approach is that it allows during a few minutes to specify in the Template Designer the formatting constructions so complex that it would be extremely difficult to create them manually in a real document using a Word processor, same as to program their generation straight in Java (as it would take to implement something conceptually similar to what the DocFlex Technology is now). Here is where the computer power can be harnessed once again!

• The TXT output is supported as well and may be used for non-documentation tasks to employ sophisticated data query and processing capabilities presented in this technology (for instance, using templates and TXT output, you can easily program dumping the data from Together models into various XML files).

• Actually, DocFlex templates are full-blown programs. What is not visualized by the Template Designer in the form of template components can be specified in component properties using FlexQuery-expressions.

  FlexQuery-expressions are small scripts with the Java-based syntax, which are widely used in DocFlex templates to specify all kinds of dynamically computed settings (such as dynamic properties of template components, filter conditions and so on).

  More than 80 built-in general utility functions are available now within the expressions, plus 26 function specific for Together, which represent some functionality provided by Together OpenAPI.

  A special utility function callForName() allows to invoke a method of any custom-written external Java-class (implementing a special interface from the DocFlex API).

  Within FlexQuery-expressions, it is possible to access the template parameters as well as various generator variables organized in the form of hierarchy of objects and properties of the Generator Object Model (similar to Document Object Model in Dynamic HTML).

• The basic set of templates provided with DocFlex/Together (both editions) allows to generate the following kinds of documentation:

  • The detailed Class Documentation (similar to that produced by Javadoc)
  • The Diagram Documentation for the following diagram types:
    • Class Diagram
    • Use-Case Diagram
    • Component Diagram
    • Deployment Diagram
    • Sequence Diagram
    • Collaboration Diagram
    • State Diagram
    • Activity Diagram
    • Robustness Diagram
    • Entity Relationship Diagram
    • (other diagram types will be supported very soon)
  • The User Interface Documentation (Together 6.x only)
  The remarkable feature of the Diagram Documentation generated in RTF output format is that all diagram images are properly scaled to fit the page size. Moreover, big diagrams will be automatically rotated into "landscape" orientation in order to minimize the image scaling (this feature can be disabled).