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Creating Eclipse help from within Eclipse

This topic explains how to create an Eclipse help documentation plug-in from within the Eclipse platform. This process allows you to set up repeatable builds directly within Eclipse, which may already be familiar to many developers working within Eclipse. The topic was originally written based on Eclipse 3.3, but much of the information still applies.
You can use a template to develop documentation plug-in with DITA in Eclipse PDE and use DITA-OT 1.8.M2 to build and pack the final plug-in. When you want to develop a documentation plug-in with DITA in Eclipse, you cannot use the previous releases of DITA-OT in Eclipse to transform DITA to HTML. Though previous releases of DITA-OT support the feature to transform DITA files to Eclipse documentation plug-in, they are not integrated with Eclipse. With DITA-OT 1.8.M2 integrated with WPT, you can develop document plug-ins with DITA in Eclipse PDE and build and pack the final plug-in by taking the following steps.
  1. Create a new PDE project in Eclipse, and apply the DITA template to the project by following the wizard.
    Start Eclipse and create a new plug-in project
  2. Set the source directory, the main ditamap file, the output directory (default value is root directory of project), css storage directory (used to contain common.css, commonltr.css, and commonrtl.css), user customized .css file name, and conditional processing ditaval file in the wizard. Use root as output directory is selected as the default.
    You can also clear Use root as output directory and specify another output directory.
    Set directories
    Specify another directory
  3. Create DITA files in the source directory and a ditamap to include the topic files that you created.
  4. Import the DITA files into the src directory of the DITA plug-in project you just created.
    1. Right-click a directory that you want to put the imported files and select Import ⇒ File system.
      Select an import file source
    2. Select the directory under which you put the DITA files.
      Select a directory
    3. Click Finish after you selected the DITA files under the specified directory. The DITA files are then imported to your DITA project.
  5. Right click build.xml, select Run As ⇒ Ant Build.

    Note

    If you're using Oracle JDK, please download and use the latest Xalan. The Xalan shipped with Oracle JDK has some issue that will cause the build failure. You can use the latest Xalan by selecting ANT Build ... and include the all of Xalan's jar files in Classpath.
    After the transformation, the output is in the output directory set in build.xml. Refresh the project after the build is successful.
    Run as Ant build
    Set the Classpath
  6. Edit the plug-in description of the property file MANITEST.MF in the plug-in editor after you run the Ant build successfully.
    1. Click MANITEST.MF to go to the Overview page.
      Overview
    2. Edit Dependencies to include org.eclipse.help.
      Edit Dependencies
    3. Edit Extensions to add org.eclipse.help.toc; right click the added org.eclipse.help.toc, and select New ⇒ toc.
      Edit Extensions
    4. Edit the Build Configuration to include the out directory or the directory you specified in .
      Edit Build Configuration
    5. Save the changes you made to the property file MANITEST.MF.
  7. Export the output to a documentation plug-in.

    Note

    build.xml can be customized to meet the requirement of headless build.
    1. Select File ⇒ Export; select Deployable plug-ins and fragments and click Next.
      Export a plug-in
    2. Select the plug-in you want to export and specify a directory under which you want to put the plug-in package.
      Select a plug-in and specify the export destination
    3. Click Finish to export the plug-in package.
Parent topic: DITA Open Toolkit Developer Reference

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