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Your website rocks, and so do you. Thank you so much!

We'll have a closer look beginning of next week.

Some things I found having a shallow look:

• Would be great to link this back to source code somehow
• Classes are exposed as default, cf. CommandStack instead of their names.
• Some external dependencies are not documented; this will bite us in downstream libraries (i.e. bpmn-js) - https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/types/Diagram.ModuleDeclaration.html.
• Links don't seem to resolve consistently (https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-1)
• Really nice how well our existing documentation renders 🎉

Classes are exposed as default, cf. CommandStack instead of their names.

@nikku I have resolved this with #858

Would be great to link this back to source code somehow

@nikku I did look into this, and I'm finding that it's not possible currently with the way things work. From what I understand, you use your library bio-dts to generate the .d.ts files for each of the JS source files. But since the docs created via TypeDoc only work with TypeScript files, and since the .d.ts files are not checked in, there is no way to refer to the source. The TypeDoc tool does create references, but they are to the .d.ts files which don't resolve as links.

It doesn't appear that bio-dts creates source maps for the symbols in the generated files, but if it could, we may be able to map those links back to the original source.

Another alternative would be to use jsdoc instead of typedoc. I tried this out and found that the output was really not great compared to what we are getting through typedoc. My guess is that your bio-dts tool does a better job understanding the JS source than jsdoc does, so typedoc has a better input as a result. Thoughts?

Edit: one more option could be to write a TypeDoc plugin that rewrites the source links then have the link originally point to the .d.ts as if it existed on GitHub (possible via the typedoc config):

"sourceLinkTemplate": "https://github.com/bpmn-io/diagram-js/blob/master/{{sourceFile}}#L{{line}}",

I don't see any way to dynamically transform the link (like replacing .d.ts with .js), but a plugin to do that should be pretty easy to whip up.

Edit 2:

I created a TypeDoc plugin that links to the GitHub source JavaScript files

const { Converter, DeclarationReflection, SignatureReflection } = require("typedoc");

module.exports.load = function load(app) {
    app.converter.on(Converter.EVENT_RESOLVE_BEGIN, (context) => {
        if (app.options.disableSources) return;
        
        for (const id in context.project.reflections) {
            const refl = context.project.reflections[id];

            if (
                !(
                    refl instanceof DeclarationReflection ||
                    refl instanceof SignatureReflection
                )
            ) {
                continue;
            }

            for (const source of refl.sources || []) {
                const fileName = source.fileName;
                const jsPath = fileName.replace(/\.d\.ts$/, '.js');
                source.url = `https://github.com/bpmn-io/diagram-js/blob/develop/${jsPath}`;
            }
        }
    });
}

With that the docs say Defined in [lib/core/Canvas.d.ts:10](https://github.com/bpmn-io/diagram-js/blob/develop/lib/core/Canvas.js) but the link points to https://github.com/bpmn-io/diagram-js/blob/develop/lib/core/Canvas.js, which I think is acceptable.

@nikku if you like this approach I can add this plugin to the PR.

Some external dependencies are not documented; this will bite us in downstream libraries (i.e. bpmn-js) - https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/types/Diagram.ModuleDeclaration.html.

@nikku I believe this is because the .d.ts files generated do not have any doc comments on the type aliases from the didi package (or others). I would expect the only way to fix this would be to alter the bio-dts process to add doc comments to those encountered @typedefs. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/62243905

Edit: also looking further into this, I see the Diagram.d.ts file defines ModuleDeclaration thusly:

type ModuleDeclaration = import('didi').ModuleDeclaration;

As this symbol is not exported, it does not get included in the documentation. Having bio-dts export that type would help. TypeDoc actually warns about this:

[warning] ModuleDeclaration, defined in ./lib/Diagram.d.ts, is referenced by Diagram.DiagramOptions.__type.modules but not included in the documentation.

If I manually edit the generated Diagram.d.ts as follows:

/**
 * The [didi](https://github.com/nikku/didi) module declaration type.
 */
export type ModuleDeclaration = import('didi').ModuleDeclaration;

Then the docs show this:

... with a link to the didi repository.

Links don't seem to resolve consistently (https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-1)

I'm not sure what you mean. In the example you provided above, it seems that the link resolution works as follows:

• https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create - the create method
• https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-1 - the first overload of the create method (taking the type "label")
• https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-2 - the second overload of the create method (taking the type "connection")
• https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-3 - the third overload of the create method (taking the type "shape")
• https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-4 - the fourth overload of the create method (taking the type "root")

Thanks for your follow-ups on this topic. Find some comments attached:

My guess is that your bio-dts tool does a better job understanding the JS source than jsdoc does, so typedoc has a better input as a result. Thoughts?

This is my thinking, too. We could do some magic at some point to find back-references to the source code from type definitions. Not impossible, but also not a priority today. Types are strictly validated and non-ambiguous, hence it makes sense to use them as a baseline.

It doesn't appear that bio-dts creates source maps for the symbols in the generated files, but if it could, we may be able to map those links back to the original source.

We indeed don't add sourcemaps as you indicated, but it should be possible to add them, linking back to the source code from a type declaration file.

I created a typedoc plugin [...]

With that [plug-in] the docs say Defined in lib/core/Canvas.d.ts:10 but the link points to https://github.com/bpmn-io/diagram-js/blob/develop/lib/core/Canvas.js, which I think is acceptable.

I think we could park this item for now, as generating types with sourcemap sounds like the better solution to me.

Regarding generation of external API references:

ref: As this symbol is not exported, it does not get included in the documentation. Having bio-dts export that type would help.

I'm not sure it would help, as just me getting to the didi source code repository does not give me the assistance that I need. Why I'm especially picky about this is because many folks using our tools (and generating documentation) will face the same issue: You cannot document what is built on top of diagram-js (i.e. bpmn-js) without an easy way to source diagram-js documentation.

Links don't seem to resolve consistently (https://joe.skeen.rocks/diagram-js/classes/core_ElementFactory.default.html#create.create-1)

I'm not sure what you mean. In the example you provided above, it seems that the link resolution works as follows [...]

Point taken, I think it works as expected.

Unrelated to this the file is another showcase for how we need to export all types declared (and used), or we'll not get proper documentation for them (#857 (comment), #857 (comment)):

To summarize what I learned through your investigations:

• exports (default) works as expected. We can fine tune the type definitions (refactor: separate export default from function declaration #858)
• we don't offer source maps for type declarations which makes it impossible to map types back to JavaScript sources
• we'd need to export all types (also utility types) or we'll not get the documentation generation we need
• linking properly to external documentation is a topic of further exploration

I did some more investigation on typedoc documentation generation yesterday:

we don't offer source maps for type declarations which makes it impossible to map types back to JavaScript sources

This is something we could accomplish, as the bio-dts foundations support it out of the box.

we'd need to #857 (comment) (also utility types) or we'll not get the documentation generation we need

It is actually worse than this. In fact we'd need to export all transitive types, which is completely unreasonable for larger libraries. Typescript itself, when generating types, does not export transitive types either.

Typescript offers a clear contract: Everything that is exposed as public API, and hintable in a code editor shall also be documented. The assumptions that typedoc comes with don't work for us, the plug-ins provided don't seem to work to generate better types, but cause endless duplication in the documentation.

linking properly to external documentation is a topic of further exploration

There exists a plug-in for that, but it only works if external documentation is typedoc, too.

Needs to be further assessed (probably simply build our own docs generator).

Declaration maps are possible, in theory. In practice it takes some work for sources to be properly mapped through our pipeline.

@joeskeen Thanks again for your work on this topic. We'll close this PR for now as it is not ready to be incorporated; we may use it as a future reference once we tackle documentation generation ourselves, probably by writing our own tool.

What we did in the mean time is to invest into advanced typing, cf. bpmn-io/bpmn-js#2153, inside your editor 🤩.