Overview

Current support for help in the Moomba workbench is basic. Currently there is a help button that is automatically added to the Workbench toolbar if a helpSupport contribution is available. When pressed, this activates the Eclipse Help system inside another browser window.

Context Sensitive help will be coming soon (MOOMBA-35).

In order for the help to work, a helpSupport contribution is required. This is achieved by providing an extension to the extension point org.karora.moomba.ui.helpSupport. More information on this extension point can be found at Help Support - org.karora.moomba.ui.helpSupport

Default Help System

There is a default help system implementation that can be used with the Moomba Workbench. The Maven2 details are:

<groupId>org.karora.moomba</groupId>
<artifactId>help</artifactId>
<version>0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

Including this bundle in your runtime will provide the workbench with the Moomba default help system.
In addition, the following bundles are also required:

org.eclipse.help.appserver
org.eclipse.help.base
org.eclipse.help.webapp
org.eclipse.help

Contributing Help

It is very simple contributing help to the Moomba Help System. You can even use the Eclipse 'New Plug-in Project' wizard along with the 'Plug-in with sample help content' template. Once you have created a new project you can use the Eclipse export wizard to export to export the project as a deployable plug-in.

Alternatively, you can manually create a help plug-in project. Refer to the following article for more information: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Online%20Help%20for%202_0/help1.htm

The article is a little out-of-date and will not work unless you add the following line to the second line of the plugin.xml file:

<?eclipse version="3.2"?>

In addition for some reason the article download files have all the files in a sub-directory (org.eclipse.helparticle). Remove this sub-directory from any downloaded zip file for the plug-in to be recognised correctly.

Host and Port numbers

By default the help system runs locally on the server machine and on a randomly selected port number. This can be somewhat unhelpful if trying to access from a client browser. You can, however, specify the host machine and port number for the help plugin to use. This is simply specified as the following system properties.

• server_port
• server_host

e.g. -Dserver_port=8080 -Dserver_host=www.myserver.com

In the above example, the help index will be available at the following url: http://www.myserver.com:8080/help/index.jsp