How to make ASP.NET WEB API HELP PAGES Xml Documentation Comments to have new line

Question

I have a rest api developed using ASP.NET WEB API. I used help pages nuget package in order to create documentation. One problem I encountered is the following. For my model objects, I have xml documentation comments and they become descriptions on the help pages for each member of the model. I want certain part of the description to be on a new line, but everything in the comment comes as one paragraph. I tried to add <br/> in the comments, but didn't help. Does anyone know how to achieve this?

Riedel

Answer 1

A similar question has been asked here: Web Api Help Page- don't escape html in xml documentation and the accepted answer (which is given by Kiran Challa - one of the ASP.NET Web API team members) describes a work around.

I just tried it myself, and it works fine.

However, instead of adding <br/> to my code comments, I changed the proposed solution from:

return node.InnerXml;

to:

return node.InnerXml.Replace("\r\n", "<br/>").Replace("\n", "<br/>");

... and as pointed out in the comments, there might be several places where you need to add @Html.Raw(), i.e., ApiGroup.cshtml, HelpPageApiModel.cshtml, and ResourceModel.cshtml and some of the partial views as well.

To figure out which views I had to change, I basically just launched the debugger in Chrome to help me inspect the html and locate the files to be changed based on that.

Nambypamby

Not sure if this would work also, but it's a bit cleaner: return node.InnerXml.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "<br>"); – Garlic