FAQs - ApexSQL Doc

In the Treeview go to the Optional Items item under Options step. Un-check the “Show Sections with no Relevant Meta Data to Document” option in the “Hiding Unused Sections/Nodes" group.

ApexSQL Doc is capable to create documentation in 3 different output formats:

• CHM format (Compiled Help File Format)
• Plain HTML
• HXS Help 2 Compiled Help File). This is the help file format of the SQL Server 2005 Books Online and Visual Studio 2005.

Yes, in the Treeview go to the Custom Text step of the Wizard under the Options node. There you find 2 text-boxes, in which you can enter your custom text to be displayed on top and at the bottom of every single page of the documentation. Standard HTML tags are accepted along with several predefined tags such as {servername} or {databasename}.

Yes, you can. Select the Database Selection item in the Treeview and simply check all required databases from the list.

The file name as well as the documentation title is built using the special predefined tags such as {servername}, {databasename} and {date} along with the fixed text. Just select the Naming page in the Treeview under the Options node and make the appropriate changes there. You can set up the file name and the overall title inside of the documentation itself exactly the same way.

Select Tools menu -> Options or hit F8 button, move to the Copyright tab and type in there the values you wish to be displayed.

Yes, you can group the objects of your database by different criteria additionally to their object types. Just select the Optional Items item in the Treeview under Options node. In the right panel you will find a section "Additional Grouping" where you can specify groupings by Filegroup, Owner and/or Partition Scheme. Note that several groupings can be made at once.

No, this is not supported in the current version of ApexSQL Doc. If there is sufficient interest we will consider this for future development.

On the Optional Items page under the Options node make sure the "Graphical Dependencies" checkbox is checked. If it is checked you will see a corresponding item in the Treeview under the Options branch. If you now select this Treeview item you can customize how the output of the graphical dependencies in the documentation should look like.

Yes – by ensuring that the 'Delete Chm Intermediary Files...' option found in the General tab of ApexSQL Doc's Options form is turned off (it’s turned on by default initially), the various CHM project files and the associated HTML content files will be saved in a subfolder off of the 'Intermediary' folder found in ApexSQL Doc's main installation folder. From there, changes can be made to the individual content pages at will. Once the edits are complete, simply compile the .chm file manually by using the MS Help File Complier app – named 'hhc.exe' – found in the ApexSQL Doc main application folder. This must be run via a command line, and takes an argument of a valid help compiler project file, which will have an extension of '.hhp'. One of these will already exist in the subfolder off of the 'Intermediary' for your particular documentation. This will complete the compilation of the CHM file with the user's edits in place.

Yes to both. On the Database Selection page of the application wizard, the database selection can be controlled two ways. In the first, simply explicitly select the databases for documentation by selecting the 'Document Only Checked Databases' selection. By using the other option, 'Document All Databases Except Checked', the user can select to universally document all databases present on a server (by leaving all databases unselected), or can opt to document all databases except for certain ones selected.

Yes. Go to Formatting page under the Options step of the wizard, and you can choose the predefined style of the document output such as VS2005 and a standard ApexSQL Doc stylesheet or you can specify the stylesheet file name for the output help file.

In the Server Detail step you have to select the various parts of server level documentation to docu ment such as Alerts, Jobs, Logins and so forth. Selections on this form determine the number of Server Related Documentation topics that are included in the final documentation. The selected nodes will be under the Server Information node.

You can turn off all options from Server Details step.

Go to Optional Items page under the Options step of the wizard, and check the 'Transact-SQL Syntax Highlight' option. By checking this ApexSQL Doc colors key SQL words in the code block section.

This is a windows "security" feature. You will have to right click on the .chm, click Properties and click Unlock option. This will unblock the help file and will display it as usual.

Yes, ApexSQL Doc generates section 'Permissions' with appropriate permissions per user or role .

No, ApexSQL Doc is not be able do document database if your user is not member of the following role: DB_OWNER.

ApexSQL Doc does not support documenting of extended stored procedures.

ApexSQL Doc decrypts an encrypted user-defined function, stored procedure, trigger, or view if you are documenting a SQL Server 2000 database and you have system administrator permissions. However, ApexSQL Doc cannot decrypt views, stored procedures, functions, DML triggers, and DDL triggers that are encrypted in a SQL Server 2005 database. Therefore, ApexSQL Doc cannot document the creation SQL for encrypted objects.

ApexSQL Doc does not support work with certificates, symmetric keys, and asymmetric keys.

No, ApexSQL Doc documents numbered stored procedures as one.

No, ApexSQL Doc doesn't monitor what account is running SQL agent or SQL server.

ApexSQL Doc supports SQL Server versions 7.0, 2000, and 2005.

Yes. ApexSQL Doc project is an XML file that can be manually edited

Yes, just make sure not to use Stored Encrypted Password in SQL Server Authentication.

For documenting large databases, the documentation process can be fairly time-intensive. There are a few options that can be disabled to improve the overall documentation time. Most of them are in the Optional Items (Performance Intensive) option group on Optional Items page under Options node of the Wizard:

1. Disable the Dependencies option.
2. Disable the Graphical Dependencies option. (Combining this step with the removal of all Dependencies options as described in step 1 will prevent any dependency parsing from occurring during the documentation operation.)
3. Disable the Transact-SQL Syntax Highlight option.
4. Disable the Custom Tags option. This will prevent parsing of the objects for custom tags.
5. Under the Tables object type node, disable the Statistical Data Analysis option.

Yes. ApexSQL Doc has been designed to work with the very large commercial databases.

Because SQL Server does not store the full DDL for table objects for access, custom tags for tables must be stored in an external TSQL file, and are specified on the Tagged Comments page of the application wizard. There is an example of how to set this up in the Examples page of the 'Tagged Comments' section. Finally, certain types of tagged comments can be selected for inclusion in the complete documentation via the application's Options form, under the Tagged Comments tab. The various types of comments are available from there for selection, including Summary, Remarks, See Also, Returns, Param, and Is New. Note that this selection will affect the multi-lined custom tags analogs as well.

Normally all tagged comments such as Summary, Remarks, Returns or Param have single line description. To extend your description using multiple lines you should use analogs of single line tags represented by pair of the tags: Summary_Begin/Summary_End, Returns_Begin/Returns_End and so forth. For more information on multi lined custom tags syntax see Multi-lined Tagged Comments section of online help.

Yes. You will need to make sure the option Include Extended Properties on the Optional Items step in the wizard is turned on. Additionally, on the Extended Properties step under the Options node you'll want to specify the Main Extended Property name to use in the documentation. The default Extended Properties to use are those stored under the label 'MS_Description', and any valid Extended Property label can be entered here.

Check Managing Extended Properties topic of online help for information on editing Extended Properties.

1. Register your documentation using Microsoft Help 2.0 SDK.
2. Set up dexplore utility for viewing of the documentation.

Yes, you can. To compile your HTML project to CHM format you need to run following command:

%ApexSQL Doc path%\hhc.exe %HTML files path%\apexdoc.hhp

Where %ApexSQL Doc path% is an installation folder of ApexSQL Doc and %HTML files path% is a directory with the HTML files to be compiled.

To compile your HTML project to Help2 format you need to run following command:

%Help 2.0 SDK path%\hxcomp.exe" -p %HTML files path%\apexdoc.HxC

Where %Help 2.0 SDK path% is a folder of Help 2.0 SDK and %HTML files path% is a directory with the HTML files to be compiled.

For viewing the files of HxS format you should have 'Visual Studio .NET Help Integration Kit 2003' installed. You may download it from here. This Microsoft product requires Visual Studio 2003 installation. VSHIK installation process description you may find consulting HTML_2.0_running section of help, Installation sub-section.

ApexSQL Doc installation folder contains the Examples folder where there are 2 command files: reg.bat and view.bat in the HxS subfolder. The View.bat batch file contains an example of how to start viewing the generated documentation:

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help\dexplore.exe" /helpcol ms-help://testDoc1/testDoc2

Where "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help" is a path to dexplore utility, testDoc1 is a help file Namespace and testDoc2 is a help file TitleID.

Your project has been already registered after generation by ApexSQL Doc. You should simply run the following command:

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help\dexplore.exe" /helpcol ms-help://Namespace/TitleID

Where Namespace is your help file namespace and TitleID is a title identifier of your help file.

If you have finished an object selection (probably even with some filters applied) that you wish to use for other documentation project, you can easily export these settings to an XML file on your file system. Just click the Export button on the Object Filter page to save the settings to a file.

Then open the new project and import the saved *.xml file clicking the Import button on the same Object Filter page – it will overwrite any existing object selections with objects from the imported profile.

On the Object Types page you will notice the "Bitwise Set" textbox on the right side. This will display the calculated value you need to use in your Command Line Interface script to document the current selection of object types.

See Import/Export section in our FAQ on how to Export a selection profile. The exported profile can be passed directly to the Command Line Interface via the /includes switch.

The current ApexSQL Doc version allows you to specify several databases at once in the /d switch. For example, to document the following four databases a1, a2, a3 and a4, at once, the command will be:

/s:CL /d:a1 a2 a3 a4

You can also use the exclude databases /ed switch, and an example will be:

/s:CL /d:northwind testdoc /ed

where the northwind and testdoc databases will be excluded from documenting. All existent databases except the specified ones will be documented.