swift-otel/swift-otel-semantic-conventions

Transform attribute mentions into DocC symbols

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#20 opened on May 26, 2025

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Description

Introduction

OpenTelemetry's semantic conventions have a lot of documentation paragraphs that mention other attributes, for example this line from http.request.header:

The User-Agent header is already captured in the user_agent.original attribute.

Proposed Feature

A nice UX improvement for our generated documentation could be to link to transform these attribute mentions into actual Swift symbol references, i.e.

/// The `User-Agent` header is already captured in the ``OTelAttribute/userAgent/original`` attribute.

... for the OTelAttribute documentation and ...

/// The `User-Agent` header is already captured in the ``Tracing/SpanAttributes/UserAgentAttributes/NestedSpanAttributes/original`` attribute.

... for the SpanAttributes documentation.

Proposed Solution

This feature can likely be built on top of @NeedleInAJayStack's excellent work in #19, which already collects the connection between OTel attribute names and generated Swift symbol names into a Context type.

Contributor guide

Research direction
Study PR #19 to understand how attribute names map to symbol names, then modify the documentation generation logic to replace attribute mentions with DocC symbol links.
Tech stack
swift
Domain
documentationdeveloper experience
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
SwiftDocC
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
60