How to reference other doxygen comments to avoid repeating yourself

Question

I am working on documenting an interface, which is described in an IDL. In this interface I am attempting to use doxygen to generate documentation.

I am looking for a way to "repeat" doxygen documentation in multiple places.

For example

struct StructA 
{
   long identifierA;   ///< Some description about this identifierA
   long identifierB;   ///< Some other description about this identifierB
   SomeTypeA dataA;
   SomeTypeB dataB;
}
struct StructB
{
   long identifierA;   // This member should be documented the same as StructA::identifierA
   long identifierB;   // This member should be documented the same as StructA::identifierB
   SomeTypeC dataC;
}

In this example, imagine that identifierA and identifierB in both data structures represent the same thing, for example, some way of indexing/identifying data (e.g. a key).

Q: If I describe the identifiers in StructA, how can I repeat the documentation for the identifiers in StructB? Obviously I could copy and paste, but that is going to create headaches if I need to change the documentation. It seems like there should be a way to reference the documentation for it in one place which may be some other place than StructA or StructB.

Or perhaps I am thinking about this documentation in the wrong way?

Answer 1

struct StructB
{
   long identifierA;   ///< @copydoc StructA::identifierA
   long identifierB;   ///< @copydoc StructA::identifierB
   SomeTypeC dataC;
}