Lightning Components Developer’s Guide

Getting Started
Creating Components
Components
Component Markup
Component Namespace
Component Bundles
Component IDs
HTML in Components
CSS in Components
Component Attributes
Component Composition
Component Body
Component Facets
Best Practices for Conditional Markup
Using Labels
Localization
Enabling Lightning Components in Salesforce1
Adding Lightning Components to Salesforce1
Configure Components for Lightning Pages and the Lightning App Builder
Adding Components to Apps
Providing Component Documentation
Expressions
UI Components
Supporting Accessibility
Communicating with Events
Creating Apps
Debugging
Reference
PDF

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Providing Component Documentation

Component documentation helps others understand and use your components.
You can provide two types of component reference documentation:
  • Documentation definition (DocDef): Full documentation on a component, including a description, sample code, and a reference to an example. DocDef supports extensive HTML markup and is useful for describing what a component is and what it does.
  • Inline descriptions: Text-only descriptions, typically one or two sentences, set via the description attribute in a tag.

To provide a DocDef, click DOCUMENTATION in the component sidebar of the Developer Console. The following example shows the DocDef for np:myComponent.

DocDef is currently supported for components and applications. Events and interfaces support inline descriptions only.

Note

A documentation definition contains these tags.

Tag Description
<aura:documentation> The top-level definition of the DocDef
<aura:description> Describes the component using extensive HTML markup. To include code samples in the description, use the <pre> tag, which renders as a code block. Code entered in the <pre> tag must be escaped. For example, escape <aura:component> by entering &lt;aura:component&gt;.
<aura:example> References an example that demonstrates how the component is used. Supports extensive HTML markup, which displays as text preceding the visual output and example component source. The example is displayed as interactive output. Multiple examples are supported and should be wrapped in individual <aura:example> tags.
  • name: The API name of the example
  • ref: The reference to the example component in the format <namespace:exampleComponent>
  • label: The label of the title

Providing an Example Component

Recall that the DocDef includes a reference to an example component. The example component is rendered as an interactive demo in the component reference documentation when it’s wired up using aura:example.

The following is an example component that demonstrates how np:myComponent can be used.

Providing Inline Descriptions

Inline descriptions provide a brief overview of what an element is about. HTML markup is not supported in inline descriptions. These tags support inline descriptions via the description attribute.

Tag Example
<aura:component> <aura:component description="Represents a button element">
<aura:attribute> <aura:attribute name="langLocale" type="String" description="The language locale used to format date value."/>
<aura:event> <aura:event type="COMPONENT" description="Indicates that a keyboard key has been pressed and released"/>
<aura:interface> <aura:interface description="A common interface for date components"/>
<aura:registerEvent> <aura:registerEvent name="keydown" type="ui:keydown" description="Indicates that a key is pressed"/>

Viewing the Documentation

The documentation you create will be available at https://<mySalesforceInstance>.lightning.force.com/auradocs/reference.app, where <mySalesforceInstance> is the name of the instance hosting your org; for example, na1.