Populating description fields in Webapi help pages

Introduction

But the same didn’t worked in our case.

Code snippets

The difference between my application and the sample project in the post is the models are located in different project rather than in same project.

We did some work around to address the problem.

We configured the XML documentation file for the both project as below 

XML documentation path for Webapi project.

XML documentation path for Contracts project.

And modified the Register method in the HelpPageConfig.cs file to combine both the XML summary comments files and set the WEBAPI to use the updated XML summary comments file.

public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
{
XmlDocument apiDoc = new XmlDocument();
apiDoc.Load(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/WebApi.Orders.xml"));
XmlDocument contractsDoc = new XmlDocument();
contractsDoc.Load(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/Contracts.xml"));
if (contractsDoc.DocumentElement != null && apiDoc.DocumentElement!=null)
{
       XmlNodeList nodes = contractsDoc.DocumentElement.ChildNodes;
       foreach (XmlNode node in nodes)
       {
              XmlNode copiedNode = apiDoc.ImportNode(node, true);
              apiDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(copiedNode);
       }
       apiDoc.Save(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/WebApi.Orders.xml"));
}
config.SetDocumentationProvider(new XmlDocumentationProvider(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/ WebApi.Orders.xml")));
…
}

The above code will combine both the XML summary comments files and generates the single XML summary comments file and we used the same to configure the WEBAPI XmlDocumentationProvider in the configuration.

           

Conclusion

Reference