Dart Doc Validation

1. When to use this skill

Use this skill when:

• Writing or updating documentation comments (///) in Dart code.
• Checking for broken documentation links, references, or macros.
• Preparing a package for publishing to pub.dev.

2. Best Practices

Validating Documentation Locally

Use the dart doc command with a temporary output directory to validate documentation comments without polluting the local project workspace.

This command parses all documentation comments and reports warnings such as:

• warning: unresolved doc reference
• warning: undefined macro

Command to run:

dart doc -o $(mktemp -d)

This ensures that the generated HTML files are stored in a temporary location and don’t clutter the package directory, while still surfacing all validation warnings in the terminal output.

Fixing Common Warnings

• Unresolved doc reference: Ensure that any identifier wrapped in square brackets ([Identifier]) correctly points to an existing class, method, property, or parameter in the current scope or imported libraries.
• Undefined macro: If using {@macro macro_name}, ensure that the template {@template macro_name} is defined in the same file or a file that is imported and visible to the documentation generator.