Adding help to an Eclipse RCP application

The following will demonstrate how to create the help in a separated plugin which contains all help related content.

Create a new Eclipse RCP project "de.vogella.rcp.help.application" with the template "RCP application with a view". Create another plugin (not RCP application) "de.vogella.rcp.help.content" with the template "Plug-in with sample help content". Select the following options.

The following plugins as dependency to your "de.vogella.rcp.help.content" plugin.

• org.eclipse.help.ui

• org.eclipse.help.webapp

• org.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty

Add the command to "org.eclipse.ui.help.displayHelp" to the main menu in "de.vogella.rcp.help.content" and assign the key "F1" via the extension point "org.eclipse.ui.bindings" to the command.

Create a launch configuration which includes "de.vogella.rcp.help.application" and "de.vogella.rcp.help.content" and run your application.

Check your plugin.xml and you see that the extension point "org.eclipse.help.toc" is used to point to toc*.xml files which describes the help content.