Adding help pages

IBM Director has a help-viewing system. You can add HTML pages that will be displayed when a user presses the F1.

Additionally, the help system has an index that is dynamically created by the IBM Director Console. Once you have completed the steps to integrate your help pages, you can add them to the index by clicking here.

Steps for adding a help page

  1. Create the help HTML page.
  2. If the help is for an interactive task, associate the help with the task.

Create the help HTML page

The help viewer in the IBM Director Console will render HTML but it is best to stick to relatively simple HTML tags.

Create the deployment folders

Under the deploy/classes folder, create the following folder structure: doc/en/bobco. Note the help is also translated; the "en" means that this is the English help. The "bobco" folder is the folder that contains all of the help for the BobCoExtension. When you are finished, the deploy folder structure will look like this:

Create the HTML file

Under the folder, deploy/classes/doc/en/bobco create the HTML help file. Our example will be named interactivetask_help.html. Again, it is best to use simple tags. Below is an example of the contents of interactivetask_help.html:

Note the use of the classes/doc/en/director.css stylesheet.

Associate the Help with the related task

Create the help properties file

Under the deploy/classes/com/bobco folder create a file to contain our help properties. For our example, call the file: BobCoHelp.properties. Edit BobCohelp.properties and add the following lines to the file

BobCoMain=bobco/main.html
BobCoInteractiveHelp=bobco/interactive_help.html
Director.index=tivoli/console/index.html

Two of the above lines are important:

Line Description
BobCoInteractiveHelp This is the line that we will use when someone presses F1 from our task frame window. Note that we do not include the "en" when we describe the help file location. "en" is the language and the IBM Director Console will understand that at runtime.
Director.index This is the line that the help system will use when the user clicks on the index. we will use for when someone presses F1 from bobco/interactive_help.html.

Add the help properties location to the task properties

Edit the task properties for the interactive task, BobCoInteractiveTask.properties and add the following line:

helpTopicsMapping = com.bobco.BobCoHelp

Add the help to the task frame

Now we need to tell the IBM Director Help System which help page that it should use for our JPanel. Edit the task frame, BobCoTaskFrame.java, and add the following line to the buildView() method:

this.getHelpContext().addHelp(returnPanel, "BobCoInteractiveHelp");

In the above line, returnPanel is the main JPanel for our task user interface. "BobCoInteractiveHelp" is the ID of the help page from the BobCoHelp.properties file. So the buildView() method will look like this:

	public Container buildView() {
		// create the panel
		JPanel returnPanel = new JPanel();
		.
		.
		.
		this.getHelpContext().addHelp(returnPanel, "BobCoInteractiveHelp");
		
		return (returnPanel);
	}

Redeploy and test

Note: you have changed the task properties, so do not forget the twgreset command when you redeploy.

When you bring up the task frame window and press F1, you should see this:

Creating the Help Index

Now you are ready to add your help page to the Help Index.