excludeExternals doesn't seem to always apply?

[kaiyoma]

I'm getting several of these warnings when running typedoc on my codebase:

[warning] Failed to resolve link to "getSnapshotBeforeUpdate" in comment for @arista/query-editor.QueryEditor.componentDidUpdate

That particular React component is a class component, so it does indeed have componentDidUpdate, but getSnapshotBeforeUpdate does not appear anywhere in my repo. Upon further digging, I found it inside @types/react:

/**
 * Called immediately after updating occurs. Not called for the initial render.
 *
 * The snapshot is only present if {@link getSnapshotBeforeUpdate} is present and returns non-null.
 */
componentDidUpdate?(prevProps: Readonly<P>, prevState: Readonly<S>, snapshot?: SS): void;

However, I have "excludeExternals": true set. Shouldn't that be enough to remove this link?

[Gerrit0]

If your class defines a componentDidUpdate method without specifying a comment on it, TypeDoc will inherit the comment from the base class, which then introduces that @link tag to your code, and it is not considered external. I suspect this is what's happening, but it's hard to tell without a reproduction.

[kaiyoma]

Okay, I can try a workaround/experiment where I add my own comment. Currently our componentDidUpdate methods don't have any comments. I'll try this out Monday and report back.

[kaiyoma]

Yup, that was it! For posterity, the original code was simply this (in a React class component):

  public componentDidUpdate(): void {
    ...
  }

Here's the workaround of adding a dummy comment to suppress the warnings:

  /** Implementation of `componentDidUpdate` for class components */
  public componentDidUpdate(): void {
    ...
  }

[Gerrit0]

If you wanted, you could also do this with a mini TypeDoc plugin.

typedoc --plugin ./typedoc-plugin.js

import * as td from "typedoc";

/** @param {td.Application} app */
export function load(app) {
	app.converter.on(
		td.Converter.EVENT_CREATE_SIGNATURE,
		(_context, sig) => {
			if (sig.name === "componentDidUpdate") {
				sig.comment ||= new td.Comment();
				if (sig.comment.summary.some(part => part.tag === "@link" && part.text === "getSnapshotBeforeUpdate")) {
					sig.comment.summary = [{ kind: "text", text: "Implementation of `componentDidUpdate` for class components" }];
				}
			}
		},
	);
}