Documentation Improvement

Default values

This applies to many, many, classes, but let's take an example.

Can things like this (from the constructor of vtkOBBTree) be listed on the class reference websites?

 this->Level = 4;
 this->MaxLevel = 12;
 this->Automatic = 1;
 this->Tolerance = 0.01;

A little section like:

Variable	Description	Default value
Level	I don't even know what this is and I use this class	4
MaxLevel	the depth of the tree?	12
Tolerance	determines how close XX are ?	0.01

It seems like it would be extremely informative (instead of going digging through cxx files for this type of information, and often still not finding it).

Function Paramters

virtual int IntersectWithLine (double p1[3], double p2[3], double tol, double &t, double x[3], double pcoords[3], int &subId)

(taken from vtkAbstractCellLocator's reference page)

The description is: "Return intersection point (if any) of finite line with cells contained in cell locator. "

Here's what I claim is missing: What is tol? What is t? What is subId? What is x? What is pcoords? And for that matter, what are p1 and p2 (when I first started using vtk I was expecting to pass a vtkLine object, not 2 points defining a line segment.)

Even after digging around for quite a while I can't find some of these answers - and I thought they would have been right on the class reference page.

Virtual Member functions (defined in superclasses) I will often call a function on a derived class, go to look for it, and find that it is not there! Of course the answer is that it lives in a superclass, but there could be users with limited c++ experience that would not know to look there. Could there be some kind of pointer to the superclass function on the

For example, in my code I often do this: vtkPolyData* polydata = vtkPolyData::New(); vtkPoints* points3D = vtkPoints::New(); // ... fill points3D .... polydata->SetPoints(points3d);

However, if I go here: http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkPolyData.html and search for "setpoints", there is nothing!

Of course going up the hierarchy to: http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkPointSet.html will find you what you're looking for, but often you have to go up 3 or 4 levels and by that time it can get very confusing.

On the PolyData page, could there be virtual void SetPoints (vtkPoints *) (see vtkPointSet)

or something like that? Maybe this is not supported by the dogygen framework?

Action I think it would take someone with some knowledge of the class less than 10 minutes to go through and make these type of statements, and it would IMMENSELY improve usability for new (and all) users.

Thoughts/comments? If I am the only one that finds this a bit annoying, then fine. But if others agree with me, maybe I can start some sort of wiki "sign up" page with a list of the classes and who will improve the documentation pages? With a group effort I don't think it would take long at all to clean up.