Implementing help

About this task
The Desktop provides a way of integrating the help mechanism for the application and the tasks running in the Desktop with the standard JavaHelp extension from Sun Microsystems. (Refer to java.sun.com/products/javahelp/features.html for a complete description of the JavaHelp extension.)

The Desktop has an internal module that initializes both the HelpSet files and a HelpBroker. The HelpSet files are files that contain the information to be displayed, and the HelpBroker is the JavaBean that displays this information. To initialize them, the toolkit gets the help file path and name defined in the XML file.

The Desktop provides the following method to display help information:

showHelp(String identifier) 

This method displays the information contained in the HelpSet file about the specific identifier.

You can use the JavaHelp feature to generate new HelpSet files for toolkit applications and to designate help identifiers for each task or application view, or for specific context-sensitive areas. For example, you might decide to specify a help identifier for each task in the application. Tasks also have a showHelp(String identifier) method, which simply delegates the process to the Desktop.