As part of extending the capability of Yaydoc to document APIs, this week we integrated API Blueprint with Yaydoc. Now we can parse apib files and add the parsed content to the generated documentation. From the official Homepage of API Blueprint,
API Blueprint is simple and accessible to everybody involved in the API lifecycle. Its syntax is concise yet expressive. With API Blueprint you can quickly design and prototype APIs to be created or document and test already deployed mission-critical APIs. It is a documentation-oriented web API description language. The API Blueprint is essentially a set of semantic assumptions laid on top of the Markdown syntax used to describe a web API.
To Integrate API Blueprint with Yaydoc, we used an sphinx extension named sphinxcontrib-apiblueprint. This extension can directly translate text in API Blueprint format into docutils nodes. The advantage with this approach as compared to using tools like aglio is that the generated html fits in nicely with the already existent theme. Though we may in future provide ability to generate html using tools like aglio if the user prefers. Adding an extension to sphinx is very easy. In the conf.py template, we added the extension to the already enabled list of extensions.
extensions += [‘sphinxcontrib.apiblueprint’]
The above extension provides a directive apiblueprint which can be then used to include apib files. The directive is very similar to the built in include directive. The difference is just that it should be only be used to include files in API Blueprint format. You can see an example below of how to use this directive.
.. apiblueprint:: <path to apib file>
Although this is enough for projects which use the ResT markup format, This cannot be used with projects using markdown as the primary markup format, since markdown doesn’t support the concept of directives. To solve this, we used the eval_rst block provided by recommonmark in Yaydoc. It allows users to embed valid ReST within markdown and recommonmark will properly parse the embedded text as ReST. Now a user can use this to use directives within markdown. You can see an example below.
```eval_rst
.. apiblueprint:: <path to apib file>
```
In order to implement this, we used the AutoStructify class provided by recommonmark. Here’s a snippet from our conf.py template. Note that this does have far reaching effects. Now users would be able to use this to add constructs like toctree in markdown which wasn’t possible before.
from recommonmark.transform import AutoStructify def setup(app): app.add_config_value('recommonmark_config', { 'enable_eval_rst': True, }, True) app.add_transform(AutoStructify)
Let’s see all of this in action. Here’s a preview of a generated documentation with API Blueprint using Yaydoc.
