Doxygen how to inherit documents from overriden methods in a generic interface?

Question

I have an interface Collection<T extends Item>, and a class that implements that interface Movies implements Collection<Movie>. The interface has a couple of abstract methods for sorting that are overriden by Movies.

What I want to know is, how can I get Doxygen to use the documentation from Collection.sort() and Collection.safeSort() in the class Movies? It'd be useful to know because then I can write the documentation for the interface, rather than each implementation of the interface. If I could -add- documentation to the overridden methods, that would be great, but that's not 100% necessary.

INHERIT_DOCS is set to YES by the way, I believe Doxygen is struggling because it implements Collection<Movie> and not Collection<T extends Item>.

Answer 1

There appear to be a number of bugs filed against doxygen related to this type of behavior, see the following for some examples:

• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516656
• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583958
• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631675

For a workaround, you could use @copydoc to bring the documentation in your base class in to your derived class, something like:

/**
 * Movies
 */
public class Movies extends Collection<Movie> {
    /**
     * @copydoc Collection<T extends Item>::sort()
     *
     * Additional documentation specific to Movies::sort().
     */
    public void sort(void) { return; }
}

This will allow the documentation in the base class to appear to in the derived class documentation without having to copy it.