Php Exporter.
-------------

Robin Harvey ([email protected]) - January 2011



(1) Introduction.
-----------------

Php  exporter a  generic  PHP source  code  parsing and  documentation
generation system.  It's different  to other similar systems (that I'm
aware of) in that it uses  an intermediary XML output format, and XSLT
sytlesheets  to convert  the intermediate  format in  to documentation
files.  Currently, there are converters for Dia xml and HTML output, I
personally don't use  the HTML one at  all, so this may need  a bit of
attention.


(2) Export Process.
-------------------

The exporter is invoked on  the command line using the code_parser.php
script.  I  usually symlink to this  file from somewhere  on my system
$PATH, from this point usage is simple:

$> cd /dir/containing/php/code
$> code_parser.php .

All  being  well,   you'll  end  up  with  a   file  in  'pwd'  called
ParsedCode.xml  - this  is  the intermediate  file,  and will  contain
intermediate XML for all PHP files from `pwd` down.  Have a look at it
and you'll recognise a large amount  of your own code!.  Now, you have
to convert  this to the  output format of  yourt choice, this  is done
with one of  the magic.xslt converters.  As mentioned,  there are 2 of
these,  they're  in  the   dia/  and  html/  subdirectoiries  of  this
distribution, currently you  have to copy the intermediate  file in to
one of these directories and  run the xslt script against it manually,
for example for the dia outputter you'd do something like this:

$> cp ParsedCode.xml /path/to/PhpExporter/dia/
$> xsltproc magix.xslt ParsedCode.xml > UmlDiagram.dia
$> dia UmlDiagram.dia


(3) TODO.
---------

(3.1) Write tests to prove the intermediate files are "correct".

(3.2)  Sort of  minor  formatting issues  with  Dia output,  implement
support for class constants.

(3.3) Implement new PHP 5.3 features - stand-alone const declarations,
namespaces, etc.

(3.4)  Complete and  re-test the  HTML formatter,  consider  adding an
option to build  in pretty-printed PHP source files  and link to these
from the generated indexes.

(3.5) Consider adding an "auto-format" option for the Dia outputter so
that diagrams  are automatically  arranged.  Currently, Dia  files are
output with  all classes sat  on top of  each other and the  user must
manually rearrange  these.  This can be  a bit of a  problem if you've
got a lot of classes.

(3.6)  Create a new  XSLT formatter  to output  files in  the Graphvis
format.

(3.7) Add  options to the code_parser  script so that you  can give it
one  or more  output  target  rather than  having  the 2-stage  output
procedure, as outlined above.

(3.8) Document the intermediate  format and output targets.  IIRC, you
can tell the code parser component to output intermediate files at the
class, file or global levels, this isn't really used at the moment.

(3.9) Write  unit tests using  PHPUnit, drop the  existing self-rolled
test class.