John Graham

Packaged in release 1.5 of the Data Tools Platform (DTP) project is a help-helper plug-in, org.eclipse.datatools.help. That plug-in contributes two key enablers for dynamic context-sensitive help:

• A ContextProviderDelegate implementation, whose methods allow the abstraction of help context IDs and context-specific help search expressions from UI code, and
• An extension point, org.eclipse.datatools.help.helpKeyProperties, which allows other plug-ins to contribute the ResourceBundle properties files that define the actual mapping of internal helpKey constants (in the UI code) to externalized help context ID strings and context-specific help search expressions.

This short talk will introduce the benefits of help context abstraction, and show you how you can use the ContextProviderDelegate to provide more useful and precisely targeted, dynamic context-sensitive help for your Eclipse application.

John has been developing enterprise software for twelve years, and has been with Sybase for the past seven. His academic background includes a Masters degree from the University of Hawai’i concentrating on computational properties of formal and natural languages, and post-graduate training in business. He has worked on enterprise application integration technologies, web services tooling, distributed systems, machine learning, and service-oriented platforms. A developer on Eclipse since version 1, John served on the Eclipse Consortium Executive Committee.

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