Ecobolic

A small library that should ease the implementation of a !help feature in chat bot

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 """
It's thanks to the 1.7 elixir update that we can add meta data to the @doc annotation
"""
Ecbolic.help("returns `:world`")
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.fetch_help, which comes in a variaty of forms:

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

Example

Ecbolic.fetch_help(:hello)
#=> "returns `:world`"

Formating

The module Ecbolic.Pretty provides some basic formating:

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:

```elixir
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 skipped

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, "~> 0.2.4"}
  ]
end

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