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<h1>Eclipse User Assistance 
Overview</font></h1>
<p>The Eclipse User Assistance is a component of the 
Eclipse Platform whose mission is to provide for assisting users of Eclipse 
applications in all phases of the usage cycle. It is not a single workbench 
artifact but rather a collection artifacts tailored to provide a particular 
flavor of assistance.</p>
<p>User Assistance component includes the following systems and mechanisms:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Online Help system for serving traditional help documents</li>
	<li>Initial User Experience (Welcome) support</li>
	<li>Cheat sheets</li>
	<li>UI Forms<font color="#800000">*</font></li>
	<li>Samples</li>
	<li>Eclipse Automation</li>
</ul>
<p><font color="#800000">* Although UI Forms are strictly an SWT-based toolkit for creating slick 
user interfaces and are not directly aimed at user assistance, it is listed here 
because its use over more traditional user interface choices improves their ease 
of use.</font></p>
<p>In addition to the current technologies, User Assistance component is a 
container for all ideas and mechanisms that serve the purpose of making Eclipse 
applications easier to use both for new and returning users.</p>
<p>We will briefly describe each system or mechanism in the following text.</p>
<h2>Online Help</h2>
<p>
<a href="http://help.eclipse.org/help31/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/help.htm">
The Eclipse platform's help</a> facilities provide the raw building blocks to 
structure and contribute documentation to the platform. It does not dictate 
structure or granularity of documentation. You can choose the tools and 
structure for your documentation that suits your needs.&nbsp;The help plug-in allows 
you to describe your documentation structure to the platform using a table of 
contents (toc) file.</p>
<p>Help system can be used in three modes:</p>
<ol>
  <li><b>Integrated</font> </b>- If you are creating an Eclipse-based product, 
	the help system is automatically provided. You can launch the help browser 
	from the <b>Help</b> menu in the workbench, or through welcome or dynamic 
	help links.<br>
&nbsp;</li>
  <li><b>Stand-alone (local)</font></b> - If you are creating an application 
	that is not based on the Eclipse framework, you can still use the Eclipse 
	help system. Your application can package and install the <i>stand-alone 
	help system</i>, a very small version of Eclipse that has had everything 
	except the help system stripped out of it. Then, your application can make 
	API calls from its <b>Help</b> menu, or from UI objects, to launch the help 
	browser. The stand-alone help system has all the features of the integrated 
	help system, as described in the following sections. However, it interacts 
	with the application UI for features such as context-sensitive help or 
	active help will vary. All features except dynamic help and active help are 
	supported.<br>
&nbsp;</li>
  <li><b>Infocenter (served)</font></b> - You can also allow your users to 
	access the help system over the Internet or their intranet, by installing 
	the stand-alone help system and the documentation plug-ins on a server. The 
	application accesses the documentation by calling a URL, and the help system 
	is shown in their web browser. The infocenter help system can be used both 
	for client applications and for web applications, either of which can have 
	their help accessed remotely. All features except dynamic and active help 
	are supported. </li>
</ol>
<p align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/overview-help.png" width="600" height="450"></p>
<p align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/overview-dynamic-help.png" width="298" height="837"></p>
<h2>Initial User Experience (Welcome)</h2>
<p>
<a href="http://help.eclipse.org/help31/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/workbench_advext_intro.htm">
Initial User Experience</a> support provides for greeting the first time users 
of an Eclipse application with a series of pages that are meant to introduce 
him/her to the application and make the initial experience favorable. The 
implementation can simply guide the user through the initial setup and then 
offer common tasks to do in the application, offer tutorials, samples (for 
development applications), links to online resources, news etc.</p>
<p>The trigger and lifecycle of the welcome support is controlled by the 
workbench. If welcome content is registered, it will be opened on fresh startup. 
Once closed, it can be reopened from the Help menu. In the most direct form, 
welcome can be written using pure SWT widgets. However, a more typical scenario 
is to use the support provided by the User Assistance intro component and author 
welcome content as a series of web pages, using either XML, HTML or XHTML 
format.</p>
<p>When XML or XHTML formats are used, welcome content can be particularly 
flexible because content reuse, content contribution and dynamic content are 
supported.</p>
<p align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/overview-welcome.png" width="480" height="379"></p>
<h2>Cheat sheets</h2>
<p>
<a href="http://help.eclipse.org/help31/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/workbench_advext_cheatsheets.htm">
Cheat sheets</a> are a type of assistive technology that is meant to lead users 
through sequential tasks. They follow the user through steps, offer help links 
for each, provide an option to perform the step for the user or let the user do 
it herself. Cheat sheets are available from the Help menu but can be 
programmatically opened whenever a task assistance is needed.</p>
<p align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/overview-cheatsheets.png" width="200" height="559"></p>
<h2>UI Forms</h2>
<p>
<a href="http://help.eclipse.org/help31/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/forms.htm">
UI Forms</a> is a toolkit based on SWT for creating powerful Web-like user 
interfaces. It is not strictly part of user assistance but is used as a 
technology for many User Assistance artifacts (implementation of initial user 
experience for platforms that do not support embedded browser, dynamic help 
view, cheat sheets etc.). For example, PDE multi-page editors use UI Forms 
extensively:</p>
<p align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/overview-uiforms.png" width="460" height="433"></p>
<h2>Samples</h2>
<p>Samples are code artifacts that are imported into the workspace as projects 
so that users can browse the code and lunch it. User Assistance provides support 
for samples that ensures the code compiles correctly regardless of the settings 
and the environment. When launched from the Welcome window, a Forms-based view 
provides assistance for the sample.</p>
<p align="center">
<img border="0" src="images/overview-samples.png" width="298" height="422"></p>
<p align="left">
<font color="#800000">Support for samples will be reworked and opened up in the 
coming releases. Watch User Assistance home page for design documents in the 
near future.</font></p>
<h2>Eclipse Automation</h2>
<p>Eclipse Automation has two main aspects: tracking and playback. Tracking user 
activity can be used for various purposes such as monitoring user actions, 
recording these actions for further analysis, recording commands into groups 
(macros) etc. The flip side is the process of affecting the workbench behavior 
by playing these commands back, typically by executing a script. Although the 
two processes are interrelated, the one does not necessarily require the other. 
For example, although command sequences can be recorded and played back later, 
the sequence of commands can also be hand-crafted. Similarly, sequence of 
commands can be converted into an activity report without any further desire to 
feed it back into the workbench.</p>
<p>The area of application automation is wide and there are many approaches 
depending on the task (macro recording/playback, scripting, usage analysis, 
automated GUI testing). The goal of Eclipse Automation is not to provide a 
complete solution for all these approaches. Instead, it is limited to enabling 
Eclipse platform to expose itself to all kinds of automation approaches that can 
be contributed by the applications building on top of the platform.</p>
<p><font color="#800000">Eclipse Automation is currently in the design stage. 
Watch User Assistance home page for design documents in the near future.</font></p>

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