Ecobolic

A small library to help your chatbot's users.

This library aims to provide a simple way of declaring and accessing documentations meant for users. This was build mainly to ease the implementation of the well-known help command, that many chat-bots provide.

Usage

Declaring

The first step is to use the Ecbolic module in the module you want to declare your documentations:

defmodule TestModule do
  use Ecbolic

Then you can add document your functions like this:

  @doc help: "returns `:world`"

  @doc """
  It's thanks to the 1.7 elixir update that we can add meta data to the @doc annotation
  """
  def hello, do: :world

At the start of your Application, or whenever you need it, you must load the documentation with with load_help/0

Testmodule.load_help()

Accessing

To access the documentations you can call the function Ecbolic.help, which comes in a variaty of forms:

• Ecbolic.help() Returns the documentation for all functions
• Ecbolic.help(functions) Returns the documentaion for the given functions
• Ecbolic.help(fuction) Returns the documentation for the given function

Example

  iex> Ecbolic.help(:hello)
  "returns `:world`"

Formating

The module Ecbolic.Pretty provides some basic formating:

  iex(1)> Ecbolic.Pretty.format(:hello)
  "hello - returns `world`"

You can provide your own format as a second parameter to Ecbolic.Pretty.format/2. The default format is ":f - :h"

Currently these are the tokens available for formating:

• :f Inserts the functions name

• :h Inserts the documentation

• :a If multiple entries are supplied, this token will align the strings, by filling them with spaces, until they all end at the same position.

  Example:

    iex(1)> Ecbolic.Pretty.format([:hello, :long_function_name]":f:a - :h")
    [
    	"hello              - returns `world`",
  "long_function_name - Long description"
    ]
  

  Note: if the function is not found, it'll be ignored

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding ecbolic to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:ecbolic, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/ecbolic.