Day: 8 June 2008

Eclipse Help / Infocenter – Workbench Mode

Eclipse offers plugin authors the ability to add Eclipse Help to their plugins. Opening that help will give a nice window with searchable help, something like this (click on the image to see it in full size): The following blog entry shows how to integrate help into an RCP application (or indeed a plugin or feature). The first thing you need to do, is to extend your plugin.xml to tell your plugin that you want to have help. In the source view of your plugin.xml include the following extension points:      To go with these entries, you now need to add the help folder to your plugin project:      The html folder under the help folder contains simple HTML documents for each page of help that you want to write. The toc.xml file is the table of contents which defines what appears in the left pane of the help system when it is opened. The help_contexts.xml file contains mappings from "context names" to files which are relevant for that context. Contexts are used when opening context sensitive help, for example when pushing the F1 button. An example of the toc.xml follows:     <toc label="BookStore"> <topic label="Introduction" href="help/html/general/overview.html"></topic> <topic label="Starting Up" href="help/html/general/startup.html"></topic> <topic label="The Process" href="help/html/general/process.html"></topic> <topic label="Screens"> <topic label="Customers" href="help/html/views/Customers.html"></topic> <topic label="Products" href="help/html/views/Products.html"></topic> </topic> <topic label="Frequently Asked Questions" href="help/html/general/faq.html"></topic> </toc> An example of the help_contexts.xml follows:      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!--==================================================================== Definition of Context-Sensitive-Help (for the F1 Button) ========================================================================--> <contexts> <!--==================================================================== In the code, set the context on the control…

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