Inline Documentation

Making code readable and accessible helps your team communicate and reduces wasted time when making changes to scripts. The ideas outlined here are guidelines based on experience and will give your team the ability to understand how your system is set up and track changes to the system.

Create a README file

For administrators that are looking at your system for the first time, knowing where to begin is often a difficult task. If you create a README file at the base of the silprograms folder, this will provide a guide of where to get started.

Commenting Code

Each script should have a small description describing what the script does and how it is run. If your code has user-defined functions, create a description for each parameter for each argument that would be passed into the function. Copy the description to your Ops Confluence site.

Block Comments

Block Comments are useful when making multiple line comments. When making a block comment, it begins with "/*" and ends with "*/". Everything in between these symbols is considered a comment. This is useful when you are testing and need to comment out a large block of code.

/*
this is a comment
this is also a comment
string value = "even this line will be considered a comment";
*/

Line Comments

An Line Comment is great when commenting one line of code. A line comment is created with two forward slashes, "//". Everything after the double forward slashes is considered a comment for the rest of the line. For example:

// this is a comment
string value = "string goes here"; // this is also a comment

"JavaDoc" Style Comments

If you look at the source code for silUnit, you will see how to properly create comments in your source code. Note the following:

A brief description of what the routine does.
A description of each parameter and a description of what each parameter represents.

/**
* Lists all the files in a given directory tree. 
* @param dirName - The path of directory to search
* @param excludes - A list of directories or files to exclude from results
* @return The list of files found in the directory
*/
function directoryFiles(string dirName, string[] excludes) {
  // rest of routine here
}

Conclusion

For a complete explanation of commenting, see this Oracle page on commenting code.

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