Expose API for getting JSDoc nodes in TypeScript files

Closure adds various semantic JSDoc annotations that aren’t currently modeled by TypeScript, such as @export (unrelated to TS export) and @nosideeffects. https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/js-for-compiler#overview

As part of our tool chain to run TypeScript through Closure we’d like to be able to munge these via the TypeScript API. It appears TypeScript gathers JSDoc comments when parsing JavaScript – is there a good reason to not gather these in TypeScript as well?

Specifically, I believe my suggestion amounts to removing the “if” statement in the below code (though I’m not certain this is the right place) in parser.ts:

        function addJSDocComment<T extends Node>(node: T): T {
            if (contextFlags & NodeFlags.JavaScriptFile) {
                ...all of the code is in here...
            }
        }

[evmar]

It appears that TS maybe now gathers JSDoc always. That is, given a ts.Node you can call getDocumentationComment() on it and it updates the (internal property) node.jsDoc (and does some caching).

However, there’s still no way to get at the parsed JSDoc there. getDocumentationComment() only returns the comment portion of the JSDoc, not the tags. So my request still stands, but now it’s just a request to expose API to retrieve the full JSDoc of a node.

[tonyhallett]

I have not checked every code path but it does appear that Parser.parseSourceFile will call createNodeWithJsDoc for JsDocContainer nodes. Can we just remove the internal comment ?

export interface JSDocContainer {
        /* @internal */ jsDoc?: JSDoc[];                      // JSDoc that directly precedes this node
        /* @internal */ jsDocCache?: ReadonlyArray<JSDocTag>; // Cache for getJSDocTags
    }

To save doing var classDeclaration:ts.ClassDeclaration=getFromSomewhere(); var jsDocs=:ts.JSDoc[]=(classDeclaration as any).jsDoc