[Ns-developers] [ns3] trace path documentation

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi,

I have pushed in http://code.nsnam.org/mathieu/ns-3-doc a bunch of
patches which add trace source documentation to the generated doxygen.
This code also adds documentation about the set of 'config paths' which
can be used with Config::Connect and Config::Set for each type of object
so, to figure out the trace path, all you have to do now is read the
doxygen and copy/paste.

There are a couple of issues to consider:
  - I had to make one API change to the attribute system: if you want to
set or get a pointer of the form Ptr<T> as an attribute, you must now
wrap that pointer in an instance of the Pointer class.
Ptr<Queue> queue;
queue = csma->GetAttribute ("TxQueue");
is now:
Ptr<Queue> queue;
Pointer q = csma->GetAttribute ("TxQueue");
queue = q.Get ();
  The upside here is that this did simplify a _lot_ the implementation
of the Attribute code in src/core/attribute.cc

  - the utils/print-introspected-doxygen.cc file contains a hardcoded
list of possible object aggregations: it records that a MobilityModel
will most likely be aggregated to a Node. This information is impossible
to derive from the class information so, I had to get it from somewhere.
If you create a new type of object which will be aggregated and if you
want that its doxygen doc is accurate, you will have to update that file
to include your aggregation option

  - while working on this code, it occured to me that there are some
ways to somewhat "simplify" the config paths to make them more
consistent. For example, the following would be (I think) much more
consistent:
/NodeList/*/$MobilityModel
to:
/ns3::NodeListPriv::NodeList/*/ns3::MobilityModel

Basically, we could request the user to specify explicitely each
attribute with a typeid.

Another thing which would probably make the parsing simpler:
/NodeList/*
to:
/NodeList[*]



regards,
Mathieu