Annotation to disable JavaDocs

Question

Is there an annotation to declare that a certain method will not be included in the JavaDocs even though it is public?

Something like:

@nojavadocs
p         


        

Answer 1

The only reason I could think of that you'd want to do this would be to "hide" the method in some sense, if only in terms of documentation. If you did that you'd be designing the documentation to be "broken" in the sense that documentation becomes broken when it goes out of date and no longer accurately reflects what the class does. Since the method is still part of the public API you're not really hiding it anyway.

If you want a method to be unused outside of the class or a few users, make it private, or package. If this is inconvenient and it must be public, I'd just document very clearly the limitations on its use, possibly with a naming convention (for example, python does this, there are entity names surrounded by underscores, that you can see but are meant to be more part of the class implementation than the public api)