How to make ASP.NET WEB API HELP PAGES Xml Documen

Question

I have a rest api developed using ASP.NET WEB API. I used help pages nuget package in order to create documentation. One problem I encountered is the following. For my model objects, I have xml documentation comments and they become descriptions on the help pages for each member of the model. I want certain part of the description to be on a new line, but everything in the comment comes as one paragraph. I tried to add <br/> in the comments, but didn't help. Does anyone know how to achieve this?

Answer 1

A similar question has been asked here: Web Api Help Page- don't escape html in xml documentation and the accepted answer (which is given by Kiran Challa - one of the ASP.NET Web API team members) describes a work around.

I just tried it myself, and it works fine.

However, instead of adding <br/> to my code comments, I changed the proposed solution from:

return node.InnerXml;

to:

return node.InnerXml.Replace("\r\n", "<br/>").Replace("\n", "<br/>");

... and as pointed out in the comments, there might be several places where you need to add @Html.Raw(), i.e., ApiGroup.cshtml, HelpPageApiModel.cshtml, and ResourceModel.cshtml and some of the partial views as well.

To figure out which views I had to change, I basically just launched the debugger in Chrome to help me inspect the html and locate the files to be changed based on that.