Constructors, Javadoc and Inheritance

I recently had the problem that I defined some very good javadoc documentation on a constructor in one of my generic classes that is inherited a lot.

The documentation, however, is never propagated to subclasses, because constructors are not inherited¹.

It is too bad that I already have to duplicate Constructors in my subclasses, but now I have to duplicate the documentation as well?

Right now, the best solution I can think of is to add a "@see" link to the appropriate super constructor. Like so:

	public class A
	{
	/**
	* Lots of juicy javadoc.
	* @param offset the offset in the array from which to start, 0 and up. Always less than the length of the array.
	*/
	public A(int offset)
	{
	}
	}
	public class B extends A
	{
	/**
	* @param offset See {@link A#A(int)}
	*/
	public B(int offset)
	{
	super();
	}
	}

view raw Constructors.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

There is a feature request/bug² defined to expand the {inheritedDoc} to also work on constructors. But it has not seen any love for a long time.

References

[1] StackOverflow - Why is inheritedDoc not defined on constructors?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14848999/why-is-inheriteddoc-not-defined-on-constructors

[2] JDK-4810216 : Allow {@inheritDoc name} for constructors

http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4810216