I agree and I think this is especially important for use case diagrams - being able to produce a nice document with diagrams and the associated text to present to the users when meeting to discuss use cases is invaluable.  That is, after all, what use case diagrams are for.

Replaced gael.de.chalendar@libertysurf.fr with richard@zygous.co.uk due to bounces by reporter

I strongly agree with this one. In fact I think using a modelling tools without the ability to document the models properly for the rest of the team is a rather fruitless operation. I think the most useful aspects of the UML is to be part of the overall documentation - at least until MDA takes off (which I do not believe in for the foreseeable future).

I strongly agree this should be added to Umbrello. This could be accomplished by simply having a template file like a HTML page for documentation and having Umbrello put in the data. For example:
<b>{class_name}</b>:
<list>
{foreach_function}
<li>{function_name}({function_attributes})
<list>
{function_description}
{foreach_attribute}
<li>{attribute_name}: {attribute_description}
</list>
{foreach_attribute_end}
{foreach_function_end}
</list>


could transfer to :
<b>RandomClass</b>:
<list>
<li>RandomFunction(RandomAttr1, RandomAttr2)
<list>
Does random stuff
<li>RandomAttr1: A random attribute
<li>RandomAttr2: another random attribute
</list>
<li>RandomFunction2(RandomAttr1)
<list>
Does more random stuff
<li>RandomAttr1: A random attribute
</list>
</list>

its not the best example but thats the best I could do ;-). Also this could be used to make your own documentation template and do other things too.

Maybe there should be operators navigating on the internal (meta) model. Since there are relationships between the models there should an easy way for the documenter to navigate through the relationships.
Anyone with experiences with GUPRO from university of Koblenz, Germany? They use a model of C (C++ ?) to make it possible to do complex requests to the parsed source code with some kind of SQL-like language.
Such requests could be used to create XML/XHTML files.
Another way to make model serializing having more parameters.

I'd like to add my vote to this feature request. I believe generation of a document could be a simple matter of provide a hook for user defined xslt stylesheets that process the xmi document into some other format (docbook comes to mind !).
In fact, what I would like to see is a general extension mechanism that lets users plug in scripts that can be run on the document (via custom menu items).
But that's something for a different RFE ;-)

Seeing that Qt does not yet natively support XSLT, IMHO
it might be easier to make an external tool that just
reads Umbrello's XMI files.
Some food for thought:

http://www.objectsbydesign.com/projects/xmi_to_html.html

Whoa, I didn't mean to close it

This is an important feature.

I think Umbrello should not reinvent the wheel here, but use existing solutions wherever possible.

For class diagrams, it already generates JavaDoc/Doxygen comments,
and the Perl code is documented using the PerlDoc syntax.

It would be nice to be able to call the documentation generator from
within Umbrello.

Maybe it should also allow different Doxygen documentation styles,
although this might be complicated/overkill ...

I adapted the xmi-to-html.xsl from Objects By Design to work with Umbrello 1.4,
save http://uml.sourceforge.net/developers/umbrello-xmi-to-html.xsl to file.
It's still very rough - improvements are welcome.

==== Copy of the mail I just sent to uml-devel ===
Hello,

I just commited the first version of the documentation generator issued from the preexisting xmi-to-html XSLTs. The new File-Export-Export to docbook menu item allows to produce a (still incomplete) documentation in directory named as the xmi file minus its suffix. The diagrams images are generated in the same directory. 
Note that the configure.in.in entries that should check for libxml2 and libxslt do not work. They report a failure bu authorize the compilation when they shouldn't. I need help for that as I am very bad with autotools...

Next step: add an "Export to HTML" menu, that will just do the docbook export followed by a docbook2html conversion using the xslt that will have to be accessible like in the script I presented some days ago.

Comments and corrections are welcome :-)

Enjoy,

Kleag

The documentation generators by Kleag will appear in 1.5.5 in a few days,
thanks again Kleag for your work.

*** Bug 149791 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***