Only some attributes are pulled into the auto-generated api .yaml files

[cjsha]

This needs to fix so that I can categorize properties into "Configuration Property" or "Acquisition Property" categories.

For example:

• [Range(0, 1000000)] is pulled into syntax.content for BeatsPerSecond
• [Category(ConfigurationCategory)] & [Description(<whatever>)] are not pulled into syntax.content for either BeatsPerSecond or Enable

The relevant files for this example are: OpenEphys.Onix.ConfigureHeartbeart.yml (generated locally by docfx metadata command) and ConfigureHeartbeart.cs

[cjsha]

relevant issue in the docfx repo

[cjsha]

After input from the docfx people, I can pull custom attributes into the metadata. They were getting excluded because docfx's default filter excludes attributes define in System.ComponentModel namespace. This can be fixed by manually including the attributes we want to use in the docs in the filter.yml like this:

attributeRules:
- include: # this is necessary to pull our custom attributes into .yml metadata without disabling the docfx default filter
    uidRegex: ^System\.ComponentModel\.(CategoryAttribute|DescriptionAttribute)$
    type: Type 

An alternative would be defining these attributes in another namespace, if possible. For example, it seems that the [Range(min, max)] attribute is defined in the Bonsai namespace so it wasn't getting filtered out. I don't know enough about attributes in C# to know if this is worth considering. In any case, I doubt it because we should mold the docs around the code and not the other way around.

Below is an example of a metadata file that is generated by including the above lines in the filter.yml file. Here you can see what I'm talking about regarding the attribute namespace. Ctrl+F the file for "attributes:" I attached a zip file because github doesn't allow attaching .yml files. OpenEphys.Onix1.ConfigureHeartbeat.zip

[jonnew]

This is a good one to discuss in our next technical meeting.