How to generate links to the android Classes' reference in javadoc?

Javadoc relies on a file called package-list to determine what Java packages are documented below a given directory. For some reason, such a file is missing for http://d.android.com/reference/, therefore the "naive" approach with

-link http://d.android.com/reference/

doesn't work – you get a warning that the package-list could not be retrieved and no links are generated into your docs. (Note: The checkboxes in that 2nd eclipse dialog just assemble -link parameters for you, so that doesn't really make any difference)

However, Javadoc offers the -linkoffline parameter to be able to adjust for precisely this situation: You want to link to some other Javadoc documentation online, but you cannot access it at the time of generating your own docs. Here's how it works: While -link takes only one parameter (the URL of the JavaDoc docs you want to link to), -linkoffline takes a second one. That one is the location of the package-list file!

So, to link to the online Android reference documentation, you should not select any checkboxes in the 2nd eclipse dialog, but instead add

-linkoffline http://d.android.com/reference file:/C:/pathtoyour/android-sdk-windows/docs/reference

in the Extra Javadoc options in the 3rd dialog. That way you use the package-list of your locally installed Android docs, but the links in your generated Javadoc will still point to the online version anyway.

Hope it helps!

By now (August 2020), Google has published a package-list on its Android developer documentation. Hence, simply linking to https://developer.android.com/reference/ or https://d.android.com/reference/ will work (just tried this with success).

Minor glitch: if you open the generated Javadoc and try to follow a link to an Android class (or one of the standard Java classes, which will also link to the Android documentation) and you are in frame mode, your browser might refuse to follow the link, as the Android site does not allow embedding in another page. Firefox then gives you the alternative of opening the target document in a new tab.

After a bit of trial and error (And plenty of suggestions gleaned from multiple web searches), I was able to get this working with a specific ANT script, which can be run in Eclipse by "Run As -> Ant Build".

I saved this file, "javadoc.xml", in the directory of my project, in parallel with the AndroidManifest.xml file.

Here is the content of the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><project basedir="." default="doc" name="api docs"><target name="doc" description="my docs"><javadoc destdir="docs" doctitle="Testing the Title" verbose="on"     use="true"     classpath="C:\Android\android-sdk_r04-windows\android-sdk-windows\platforms\android-2.1\android.jar;.\libs\admob-sdk-android.jar"    sourcepath="gen;src"    linkoffline="http://d.android.com/reference C:\Android\android-sdk_r04-windows\android-sdk-windows\docs\reference"    stylesheetfile="C:\Android\android-sdk_r04-windows\android-sdk-windows\docs\assets\android-developer-docs.css"    ></javadoc></target></project>