Providing Help - Example

The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse

Let's face it—every tool needs to have online documentation. It is a required task of any tool development effort. Yet it is often relegated to the role of the forgotten child of the software development process. Fortunately, as you learned in Chapter 22, Providing Help, Eclipse puts the Help system on equal footing by including it in its integration architecture. In fact, integrating help documentation is an easy first step towards Eclipse integration because all you need to provide, in addition to the help content, is some simple XML for your plug-in.

The example presents a sample set of XML and HTML files to demonstrate what you will need to write for your own integrated online documentation.

Running the Example

Verify that you have imported the project com.ibm.jdg2e.help from the CD-ROM. To run the example, launch the run-time instance of Eclipse (Run > Run As > Eclipse Application).

Select Help > Help Contents
In the table of contents on the left, select JDG2E: Help Example TOC.

Notice that this entry is integrated along with the rest of the Eclipse online documentation. You can then select the various help topics under this heading to view the sample help files.
Although it isn't formally an example from the book, we hope that you agree that our infocenter serves as a good demonstration of online help. The documentation plug-in is the project com.ibm.jdg2e.doc.isv_3.0.0 in the e:\infocenter\eclipse\plugins directory, where e: is your CD-ROM drive. The readme describes how to install the book's online documentation into an existing Eclipse SDK and how to run it directly from the CD-ROM as a browser-based Infocenter.

Roadmap of the Example

This example uses the help extension point org.eclipse.help.toc and requires no Java code. You can view the plugin.xml file and the various XML files to see how the table of contents, topics and sub-topics are linked together.