Back in 2016 a friend and former colleague introduced me to the MacOS application called Dash. Dash is an offline documentation viewer with hundreds of ready documentation sets and even support for custom ones. This was perfect for the lesser-known CMS – Sitevision – we worked with back then and I still do. It gave us all the documentation we needed at the tip of our fingers.
Already back then, the creator of Dash provided a binary for building a Docset out of Javadoc-generated documentation. There were however a couple of more steps that were needed before you got your final Docset. I guess this was one of the reasons that led my friend to write a Makefile which automated those steps so you only needed to run make for the Docset to be updated.
This Makefile worked great and even though it was a manual update each time a new version of the documentation was available, it was still a simple process.
Fast-forward to 2024. I now work as a consultant for a client who provided a work PC, with Windows. Yikes!
Since I no longer could use Dash, I had to start using the online documentation again which resulted in me feeling less productive than before. Still, it took me quite some time before I started researching alternatives to Dash for Windows.
I ended up using Zeal and one of the reasons is that they support Dash Docsets. The most straightforward way of installing a Docset in Zeal is by adding a feed.
Dash also supports feeds, and this got me into experimenting with an automated generation of the Docset for Sitevision Public API.
And here we are. It took me 9 years of manual updates before I finally automated the process. The Makefile has been replaced with a workflow in GitHub Actions which generates the needed files and pushes them to GitHub Pages.
The best part is that both Dash and Zeal handles auto update of the offline documentation from the feed.
Check it out at:
hampusn/sitevision-dash-docs