Optional: Adding help to the node

  1. Add online help to the node. You can create a help.html file within the project to contain the online help that explains what the node does and how to use it. If you have several files, you might want to consider creating a separate doc subdirectory in the plugin project and storing the online help files in there. You can make the node's online help appear integrated with the product-supplied information. In the WebSphere Message Broker product information, under Reference > Message flows, there is a leaf node called "User-defined nodes". To make the online help for your node appear at that point, you need to:
    1. Modify the plugin.xml file to include the following extension point to the WebSphere Message Broker product documentation:
      <extension point="org.eclipse.help.toc">
      	<toc file="toc.xml"/>
      </extension>
    2. Create a toc.xml file in your plugin node project, and modify the link_to attribute to link to the "UDNodes" anchor that is already defined in the WebSphere Message Broker documentation table of contents as follows:
      <toc label="My Plugin Node" topic="my_node.htm"
      											 link_to="../com.ibm.etools.mft.doc/toc.xml#UDNodes">
      	<topic label="Mytopic 1" href="topic1.htm>
      </toc>
      You should then be able to see your help topic under Reference > Message flows > User-defined nodes, in the table of contents.

      The sample nodes provided with the product demonstrate this feature.

      For further explanation of extension points and how to use them, see the PDE Guide.

  2. Add context sensitive (F1) help to the node. This is the help that you see when you click on a node in the Broker Application Development perspective and press F1.

    When a node is created, a HelpContexts.xml file is created. This assigns a context id based on the name of the node. You can modify the HelpContexts.xml file for your node by changing the text on the description field. The name of the HelpContexts.xml file must be unique within the project but can contain multiple context entries, for example, if you had several nodes within a single project, each node can have its context-sensitive help in the file.

    Context-sensitive help is limited in length. A useful way of providing more help to the user is to link from the F1 help to an HTML file containing further information, for example, to the node's online help, described above. The link should be coded as follows:
    <topic href"../plugin directory/html file" label="Link title">
  3. Add hover help (tooltip help) to the node. When a node is created, a palette.properties file is created. You can modify this file to contain hover help for your node, which is used to show the node name when the palette is not wide enough to display it all.

If you do not want to add any of the optional features, you can test your node at this point. To do this you need to launch another instance of the workbenchStart of change, see Enabling PDE runtime capabilitiesEnd of change, and select Run > Run as > Runtime Workbench. See the PDE Guide for more information about testing using the Runtime Workbench.

Related concepts
User-defined input nodes
User-defined message processing nodes
User-defined output nodes
Related tasks
Developing user-defined extensions
Implementing the provided samples
Testing a user-defined node
Distributing a user-defined extension
Related reference
User-defined extensions