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DTP Help-Helper Plug-in

DTP Help-Helper Plug-in. John Graham Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Project. Dynamic Context-Sensitive Help. Current sequence UI plug-in passes help context ID and search expression strings to Help system, using IContextProvider methods

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DTP Help-Helper Plug-in

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  1. DTP Help-Helper Plug-in John Graham Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Project

  2. Dynamic Context-Sensitive Help • Current sequence • UI plug-in passes help context ID and search expression strings to Help system, using IContextProvider methods • Help system displays the content indexed to context ID, shows “Related Topics” in dynamic help view, using search expression • Problems • UI plug-in “owns” the hard coded help context ID and search expression strings • Changing a context ID or search expression string impacts the UI plug-in (requires rebuilding)

  3. DTP Helper-Help Plug-in • Goals • Simplify handling of help context IDs and search expressions for IContextProvider methods • More flexibility to refine context IDs and search expressions, improve the quality of context-sensitive help • Reduce impact to UI plug-ins and Java code • Strategy • Abstraction layer — insulates UI plug-ins from help context ID and context-specific help search expression strings

  4. DTP Helper-Help Plug-in • New Sequence • UI plug-in passes an abstract helpKey constant to the ContextProviderDelegate (DTP help-helper) • ContextProviderDelegate returns help context ID and search expression strings (contributed by C-S Help provider) • UI plug-in passes help context ID and search expression strings to Help system, using IContextProvider methods • Help system displays the content

  5. DTP Helper-Help Plug-in

  6. DTP Helper-Help Plug-in • Advantages • More flexible and extensible help infrastructure • More useful and precisely targeted dynamic context-sensitive help • Isolation of responsibilities • Dev teams create and own the abstract helpKey constant for each UI control • Doc teams create and own help context ID and search expression strings, mapping of helpKey-to-context ID and helpKey-to-search expression

  7. Supported Designs • Conventional “straight-through” mapping • C-S Help contributors: • Provide only contexts.xml files • Extend only org.eclipse.help.contexts • Parity with previous method • Context abstraction • C-S Help contributors: • Provide both helpKey-mapping properties files and contexts.xml files • Extend both org.eclipse.help.contexts and org.eclipse.datatools.help.helpKeyProperties

  8. Thank You! • Resources • DTP 1.6 builds (www.eclipse.org/datatools) • Documentation (wiki.eclipse.org/Data_Tools_Platform_Project) • Contacting us • DTP newsgroup • dtp-dev@eclipse.org mailing list • Here at EclipseCon: Bof, other Data Tooling talks

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