How can I document implicit methods inside of rails models?

Question

I'm using YARD on my Rails project and was wondering how I would go about documenting inherited/runtime methods on a Rails model? For instance documenting the existence of a first_name attribute on a User model.

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/02/activerecord-ruby2ruby-this-is-where.html Ruby2Ruby might be helpful, but you'd have to make up your own rdoc generating workflow, `gem rdoc your_project` most likely wouldn't work unless you did some crazy fork of rdoc. — Tim Snowhite, Apr 08 '11 at 15:50

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 19 '10 at 07:43

You can't do that, IMHO.

The trouble is that those methods don't really "exist"; They are "created on the fly" via method_missing hooks, the first time they are invoked, on runtime.

Other documentation generation systems have ways to declare "implicit" methods. For example NaturalDocs has a function keyword that allows you to create functions that only exist on the comments. I'm not familiar enough with YARD, but it seems it doesn't have a similar functionality.

Good luck!

How can I document implicit methods inside of rails models?

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