we could, but it isn't ideal. this will necessitate that every table and field gets defined twice - in php array and phpdoc. true that only the name is duplicated but still - the chance for out of sync increases. anyway, we don't need this on api.drupal.org. people who want a data dictionary just install schema module and they have a data dictionary exactly matching their current site. as barry said, the data dictionary presentation is already done. On 8/9/07, Dries Buytaert <dries.buytaert@gmail.com> wrote:
On 09 Aug 2007, at 07:00, Angela Byron wrote:
Earl came up with this slick idea in the Views 2.0 schema to stick a 'description' attribute on each field in the schema file. Drupal will of course ignore this, having no knowledge of what a description is, but human beings (and probably eventually parsers) can read this information in order to determine what the various fields are for. Additionally, the documentation is *part of the source code*, which means we can deny schema additions until they have documentation associated, just as we deny new functions without PHPDoc. And finally, because the descriptions are stored in t() functions, that means the documentation is (potentially?) translatable to other languages.
Is there a reason why we can't use PHPdoc for this? (I'm not really keen on having to execute random PHP code on api.drupal.org.)
-- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/