Java - Generating javadocs for your source code with Maven using Custom Doclet (GraphViz)

Its always good to have a visual representation rather than a text based representation for us to understand things better. This concept works well for the javadocs that we generate as well. As mentioned in one of my other blogs - Software Tools - I managed to use GraphViz and UmlGraph to generate javadocs with ClassDiagrams. You can also automate this by integrating all this into your Maven POM.

So if you are using Maven as the build tool on your project and you want to generate javadocs for all your source files with the UML classdiagram embedded on them, please add the following to your POM inside the build/plugins section.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.8</version>
    <configuration>
        <reportOutputDirectory>C:/Project/apiDocs</reportOutputDirectory>
        <doclet>org.umlgraph.doclet.UmlGraphDoc</doclet>
        <docletArtifact>
            <groupId>org.umlgraph</groupId>
            <artifactId>doclet</artifactId>
            <version>5.1</version>
        </docletArtifact>
        <additionalparam>-views</additionalparam>
        <useStandardDocletOptions>true</useStandardDocletOptions>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>aggregate</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>aggregate</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

As mentioned in my other post on javadoc generation using Maven please make necessary changes to your mvn command. Also make sure you download GraphViz, install the same and add its bin folder to the PATH environment variable before running the mvn command or executing the script that runs the mvn command otherwise you would see issues about "dot" not being recognized as a commnd or some error of that kind.