Re: [cdt-dev] Help Books and Hover Help for CDT

[Roman Levenstein <romixlev@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Norbert,

Thanks for your help. The direction is clear. I
already tried before what you propose, at least to
some extent. For example, the hover help functions
from CHelpProvider were called. But then again it is
not clear, where to fetch the help information from?
Is it possible to get it efficiently from some sort of
Help/ZIP/JAR/HTML docs similar to how it is done in
JDT for JavaDoc? Are there some classes that can do it
for me? Or should I write my own implementation for
it?

But what wonders me is the fact, that CDT implements
many of these Help related things very differently
from JDT. Why? It would be much easier to use the
common code base. For example, your proposals for
AST-based context information are already implemented
in JDT since a while. Also the way to access the help
documentation for a hover help from JavaDoc or the
like is also implemented. But in CDT we seem to
reinvent the wheel.

I think these issues with the Help system in CDT are
quite important for usability. CDT is getting more and
more popular and is being used for many projects. And
still, there is no easy way to provide a convenient
access to the context-sensitive help information. Is
there no need for it? Nobody wants to give the
description of their APIs in a context-sensitive
manner? I don't believe it! Actually,in most cases, it
would be already enough to provide just an easy way to
supply some help files in HTML/XML format (may be
inside a JAR/ZIP file) via an extension point and the
extended standard CDT functionality would
automatically try to search for it there and
popup/display the hover help window or something
similar. BTW, it would also make it easier for those
who write the Help documentation. These people are not
always programmers and cannot do it themselves now,
since it requires too much Eclipse plugin programming
from them. With a simple extension point, where just a
path to the hover help documentation files should be
given, everybody would be able to produce the help
plugins for CDT.

What do you think about such kind of extension point
and about the attempts to unify JDT and CDT help
systems code?

Best regards,
 Roman

--- Norbert Ploett <norbert.ploett@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello Roman,
> 
> there is an extension point for adding C/C++ help
> documentation: 
> org.eclipse.cdt.ui.CHelpProvider
> 
> The extension point lets you define a help provider
> class which implements 
> ICHelpProvider. ICHelpProvider has methods which are
> called for
> 
> - context sensitive help on an identifier by putting
> the cursor in the 
> identifier and pressing F1 (or Shift-F1 on Linux)
> - hover help an an identifier
> - code completion proposals for an identifier prefix
> 
> I do not remember having seen any documentation for
> this but you should get 
> along by exploring the API and do some trial - and -
> error testing. Also feel 
> free to ask me since I have been working for quite a
> while on this stuff now.
> 
> Good luck,
> 
> 
> Norbert
> _______________________________________________
> cdt-dev mailing list
> cdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/cdt-dev
> 



		
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