Creating help plug-ins

A help plug-in contains the files required to display your application’s help files in the z/OSMF help system.

1. To create a panel help plug-in, which is the plug-in that contains the help files for each page, window, and action provided in your application, complete the following steps:
   1. Create a folder for the panel help that has the name com.company-name.task-name.help.doc, where company-name is your company’s name and task-name is the task name that will be displayed in the z/OSMF navigation area. For example, com.ibm.incidentlog.help.doc.
   2. Store the folder in the UNIX file system, and set 755 permissions for the folder. For all files stored in this folder, set 644 permissions.
   3. Create the help content, and code it using the XHTML tagging language. Then, combine the files into a single compressed folder named doc.zip. For more details, see Developing panel help.
   4. Create the table of contents in XML format, and name the file toc.xml. For instructions, see Creating the table of contents.
   5. Assign the plug-in to the same category you plan to use for your application in the z/OSMF navigation area. For instructions, see Categorizing help plug-ins.
   6. Use the XML tagging language to create a file named plugin.xml, which describes the plug-in to the z/OSMF help system. For instructions, see Identifying the contents of help plug-ins.
   7. Store the doc.zip folder, toc.xml file, index.xml file, and plugin.xml file in the folder you created.
   8. In the plug-in folder, create an nl sub-folder that contains a folder for each language in which the help content is translated, if any. Store the translated files in the correct language folder, which is identified by a 2-character language code. For a list of language codes, see http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php.
2. To create a message help plug-in, which is the plug-in that contains the help files for each message your application issues, complete all of the previous steps with the following exceptions:
   • Store the resulting doc.zip folder, toc.xml file, index.xml file, plugin.xml file, and nl folder in a folder named com.company-name.task-name.message.help.doc.
   • Assign the message help plug-in to the z/OSMF messages category.

   For information about creating messages and message help, see Developing message help.