Control Diagrams with Doxygen

Question

I am working on a C ++ project in the field of automation. I would like to start documenting. I rather decided for Doxygen. But, in addition to documenting individual data fields and drawing UML diagrams of a hierarchy class, I would like to document the functions of several methods with block diagrams like these:

What are the solutions?

I am familiar with LaTeX. I read that Doxygen has LaTeX support, but I don't know how far this is. Can I use any LaTeX package in Doxygen? What specific packages would you recommend and could you provide some simple examples?

I am also open to recommendations other than Doxygen.

Answer 1

If this is only due to the fact that you registered the structure of the control systems, variables, etc., you can create a diagram in another place (for example, Dia, XFig or Inkscape, if you want to use open source tools) and implement them in the Doxygen documentation through the image, the keyword from your code:

/*! .. Doxygen doc here.. \image html Data_Model.png "Figure 1: UML Diagram of the Data Source and Data Model Relationships" */ 

To do this, you need to specify Doxygen in the Doxyfile where to find the images, and place the images relative to your doxygen path (DOCROOT / images in this case):

 # The IMAGE_PATH tag can be used to specify one or more files or # directories that contain image that are included in the documentation (see # the \image command). IMAGE_PATH = images 

Using latex extensions or other language-based graphical markups to generate graphs from the Doxygen doc does not make imho justify the overhead of learning a language, establishing and aligning a tool chain. On the other hand, if you already have a tool that automatically generates a chart (from your code or configuration file), there must be a breeze to run the tool from the Makefile, let it generate an image and embed the image in your doxygen doc via the image keyword.