Subgroups

Doxygen groups (\groupdef, addtogroup, etc) produce separate pages by design – as such, they cannot be used to group members together. However, often times a bunch of members relate so closely to one another that they simply do not deserve a dedicated documentation block for each and every one of them. We would like to have one block for a subgroup of closely related members – and display these members as such, i.e. together.

Doxyrest provides a facility just for that – subgroups.

In your Doxyfile, add this alias:

INTERNAL_DOCS = YES
ALIASES += "subgroup=\internal :subgroup: \endinternal"

In your C/C++ code, add this special comment to the very first member in the subgroup:

/*!
    \subgroup

    Functions ``foo()``, ``bar()``, and ``baz()`` do similar things
    with a few minor differences, as outlined here: ...

*/

void foo();
void bar();
void baz();

In your final documentation, you will have all three functions grouped together as such:

void foo()
void bar()
void baz()

Functions foo(), bar(), and baz() do similar things with a few minor differences, as outlined as outlined here: …

Note

Why not have something like \groupdef, but for members on the same page?

Well, in my opinion, that would be a wrong thing to do. We already have two levels of member grouping:

• By protection level (public, protected, etc);

• By member kind (variables, functions, etc).

Adding yet another level of grouping – to the same page – would destroy the nice compound overview we have right now and would be unintuitive to comprehend.

If there really is a need to subdivide members (of a class, for instance), the proper approach would be to adjust the API itself (i.e. subdivide related members between subclasses).