Document Kotlin code: KDoc and Dokka

Block tags

KDoc currently supports the following block tags:

@param name

Documents a value parameter of a function or a type parameter of a class, property or function. To better separate the parameter name from the description, if you prefer, you can enclose the name of the parameter in brackets. The following two syntaxes are therefore equivalent:

@param name description. @param[name] description.

@return

Documents the return value of a function.

@constructor

Documents the primary constructor of a class.

@receiver

Documents the receiver of an extension function.

@property name

Documents the property of a class which has the specified name. This tag can be used for documenting properties declared in the primary constructor, where putting a doc comment directly before the property definition would be awkward.

@throws class, @exception class

Documents an exception which can be thrown by a method. Since Kotlin does not have checked exceptions, there is also no expectation that all possible exceptions are documented, but you can still use this tag when it provides useful information for users of the class.

@sample identifier

Embeds the body of the function with the specified qualified name into the documentation for the current element, in order to show an example of how the element could be used.

@see identifier

Adds a link to the specified class or method to the See also block of the documentation.

@author

Specifies the author of the element being documented.

@since

Specifies the version of the software in which the element being documented was introduced.

@suppress

Excludes the element from the generated documentation. Can be used for elements which are not part of the official API of a module but still have to be visible externally.

Links to elements

To link to another element (class, method, property, or parameter), simply put its name in square brackets:

Use the method [foo] for this purpose.

If you want to specify a custom label for the link, use the Markdown reference-style syntax:

Use [this method][foo] for this purpose.

You can also use qualified names in the links. Note that, unlike JavaDoc, qualified names always use the dot character to separate the components, even before a method name:

Use [kotlin.reflect.KClass.properties] to enumerate the properties of the class.

Names in links are resolved using the same rules as if the name was used inside the element being documented. In particular, this means that if you have imported a name into the current file, you don't need to fully qualify it when you use it in a KDoc comment.

Note that KDoc does not have any syntax for resolving overloaded members in links. Since the Kotlin documentation generation tool puts the documentation for all overloads of a function on the same page, identifying a specific overloaded function is not required for the link to work.