Web Api Help Page XML comments from more than 1 files

Question

I have different plugins in my Web api project with their own XML docs, and have one centralized Help page, but the problem is that Web Api's default Help Page only supports single documentation file

new XmlDocumentationProvider(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/Documentation.xml"))

How is it possible to load config from different files? I wan to do sth like this:

new XmlDocumentationProvider("PluginsFolder/*.xml")

Answer 1

You can modify the installed XmlDocumentationProvider at Areas\HelpPage to do something like following:

Merge multiple Xml document files into a single one:

Example code(is missing some error checks and validation):

using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Xml.XPath;

 XDocument finalDoc = null;
 foreach (string file in Directory.GetFiles(@"PluginsFolder", "*.xml"))
 {
    if(finalDoc == null)
    {
        finalDoc = XDocument.Load(File.OpenRead(file));
    }
    else
    {
        XDocument xdocAdditional = XDocument.Load(File.OpenRead(file));

        finalDoc.Root.XPathSelectElement("/doc/members")
                     .Add(xdocAdditional.Root.XPathSelectElement("/doc/members").Elements());
    }
}

// Supply the navigator that rest of the XmlDocumentationProvider code looks for
_documentNavigator = finalDoc.CreateNavigator();