Overview

The following describes how to add a help system to your Eclipse RCP application. This article assumes what you are familiar with basic Eclipse RCP development. Please see Eclipse ECP Tutorials.

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.

Thank you

Thank you for practicing with this tutorial.

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