© 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 | 3/2008 DTP Help-Helper Plug-in John Graham Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) Project

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 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)

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 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

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 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

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 DTP Helper-Help Plug-in

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 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

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 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

DTP Helper-Help Plug-in | Short Talk | © 2008 by Sybase, Inc.; made available under the EPL v1.0 Thank You!  Resources  DTP 1.6 builds (  Documentation (wiki.eclipse.org/Data_Tools_Platform_Project)  Contacting us  DTP newsgroup  mailing list  Here at EclipseCon: Bof, other Data Tooling talks