Is there a way to provide custom online help resulution for members of unsupported libraries?

[koszeggy]

Description:

In some of my libraries I reference types in help pages that are not resolved automatically by SHFB.

Referencing such types (eg. SKBitmap or WinUI's Color) cause BE0066 warnings during the compilation.

For example:

SHFB(0,0): warning BE0066: ResolveReferenceLinksComponent: [M:KGySoft.Drawing.SkiaSharp.SKBitmapExtensions.GetReadWriteBitmapData(SkiaSharp.SKBitmap,SkiaSharp.SKColor,System.Byte)] Unknown reference link target 'T:SkiaSharp.SKBitmap'.

As a partial workaround now I replaced all <see cref="..."/> tags to <a href="...">...<a> in the documentation comments but it resolves only the links I explicitly put into the description, not the generated ones. So the generated help page still contains unresolved links and the compilation is full of BE0066 warnings I cannot avoid so it's really hard to spot the real issues that I should fix.

As an example, see this help page. I highlighted the result of the different references for the parameters:

Annotated links of this help page.

• Green ellipses: Auto resolved links or explicit <see cref="..."/> references
• Red rectangles: Failed resolutions (BE0066 warnings)
• Blue highlights: Explicit <a href="...">...<a> references as workaround where <see cref="..."/> references would not work (BE0066)

The question:

Is there a way to tell SHFB how to resolve these unknown targets? I would like to specify a custom mapping, something like this:

T:SkiaSharp.SKBitmap --> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/skiasharp.skbitmap
T:Windows.UI.Color --> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/windows.ui.color
etc.

Apparently neither the Additional Reference Links, nor the Member ID Fix-Ups plugins can be used for this (or just I couldn't figure it out how). It would be nice to allow any URL not just learn.microsoft.com if the documentation for a member is somewhere else.

[EWSoftware]

The Member ID Fix-Ups plug-in is for fixing issues with member IDs generated by the C++ and VB compilers. The Additional Reference Links plug-in was mainly for the offline MSDN content. For online content, it is generally used to suppress the warnings and generate non-clickable labels rather than links.

Out of the box there isn't a way to generate links to third party content but I plan on adding support at some point. I just haven't had the time to look into it. It has come up before and others have created plug-ins and components to handle it. This is one I found from issue 882. It may not be current and may require some updates to work with the latest release but appears to do what you want so it may be a good starting point.

[koszeggy]

Wow, thank you, I'm going to check it out.

[EWSoftware]

See #998 for an improved version of the noted plug-in.