auto-document exceptions on methods in C#/.NET
- by Sarah Vessels
I would like some tool, preferably one that plugs into VS 2008/2010, that will go through my methods and add XML comments about the possible exceptions they can throw. I don't want the <summary> or other XML tags to be generated for me because I'll fill those out myself, but it would be nice if even on private/protected methods I could see which exceptions could be thrown. Otherwise I find myself going through the methods and hovering on all the method calls within them to see the list of exceptions, then updating that method's <exception list to include those. Maybe a VS macro could do this?
From this:
private static string getConfigFilePath()
{
return Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, CONFIG_FILE);
}
To this:
/// <exception cref="System.ArgumentException"/>
/// <exception cref="System.ArgumentNullException"/>
/// <exception cref="System.IO.IOException"/>
/// <exception cref="System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException"/>
/// <exception cref="System.Security.SecurityException"/>
private static string getConfigFilePath()
{
return Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, CONFIG_FILE);
}
Update: it seems like the tool would have to go through the methods recursively, e.g., method1 calls method2 which calls method3 which is documented as throwing NullReferenceException, so both method2 and method1 are documented by the tool as also throwing NullReferenceException. The tool would also need to eliminate duplicates, like if two calls within a method are documented as throwing DirectoryNotFoundException, the method would only list <exception cref="System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException"/> once.
