How can I debug a Doclet in Eclipse?

Question

I am creating a custom doclet that I want to run in my Maven build with the Javadoc plugin, but right now I'd like to test / debug the Doclet in Eclipse. How can I do that?

Do I have to invoke javadoc programmatically? And how?

Answer 1

If you are running JDK v1.8, you may need to use the following code snippet:

Main.execute(docletFqcn.getClass().getClassLoader(), "-doclet", docletFqcn, javaSourceFilePath);

where docletFqcn is the fully qualified class name of your Doclet class and javaSourceFilePath the location of the Java file to process.

Answer 2

I got error message with @Jan answer

Error:(13, 35) java: reference to execute is ambiguous
  both method execute(java.lang.String...) in com.sun.tools.javadoc.Main and method execute(java.lang.String,java.lang.String...) in com.sun.tools.javadoc.Main match

After change to these code and it work well

com.sun.tools.javadoc.Main.execute(new String[]{
                "-doclet", CustomDoclet.class.getName(),
                "path/to/src/XXX.java"
        });

Answer 3

you can simply create a main method in your doclet and call (example, see full cmdling reference):

public class MyDoclet extends Doclet {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        com.sun.tools.javadoc.Main.execute("-doclet " + MyDoclet.class.getName());
    }
}

That also works with the debugger.

You might also have to add the -classpath parameter containing all jar dependencies needed to parse the actual code.