A very simple plugin for JSDoc to display screenshot images

This is a simple JSDoc plugin that inserts an image into the HTML pages created by the JSDoc build process. I created this plugin because I wanted the built documentation webpages to show what a particular component of a JS application looks like for the end user.

This plugin uses a new tag, named @screenshot, whose value is an absolute or relative URL to an image file. Although the image contents don't need to be of a screenshot, the tag name (@screenshot) was chosen to provide context to the image contents when looking at the JSDoc comments inline with code.

To use

@screenshot MyView.png
@screenshot https://my-site.com/MyView.png

You can view some live examples on the MetacatUI documentation website which is the project I originally wrote this code for.

Install

1. Step 1. Add the jsdoc-screenshot/src directory with the screenshot.js file to whatever location you normally store your JSDoc plugins for your application and rename it to whatever you want (e.g. screenshot).

2. Step 2. Add this as a plugin to your JSDoc configuration. Specify a directory where your screenshot images will be stored (if you are storing all your images externally, this isn't necessary).

JSDoc config file snippet example:

  "plugins": ["jsdoc-plugins/screenshot"],
 "screenshot": {
   "dir": "../screenshots"
 }

3. Step 3. Add the following code to any JSDoc template(s) where you want to show the screenshot image. You can customize this HTML however you'd like.

Example:

<?js if (doc.screenshot) { ?>
   <div class="screenshot">
     <h3>Screenshot</h3>
     <img src="<?js= doc.screenshot ?>" />
   </div>
<?js } ?>

4. Step 4. Use the new @screenshot tag in your JSDoc comments.

Example @screenshot tags:

@screenshot MyView.png
@screenshot https://my-site.com/MyView.png