Introduction to Context-Sensitive Help

Context-sensitive help is focused user assistance content, specific to the current application context (that is, the help context), and presented on demand when a platform-specific trigger is activated (for example, F1 on Windows).

Context-sensitive help requires interactions between user interface (UI) components, user assistance (UA) components, and the Eclipse platform help system.

UI components:

Contribute UI controls
Define the association of help contexts with UI controls

UA components:

Contribute context-specific help content and online documentation content
Define the association of help contexts with context-specific help content and related online documentation topics

Eclipse help system:

Resolves help context references to matching context-specific help contributions
Contributes the help presentation mechanisms (for example, the Help view)
Provides API to enable context-sensitive help interactions for UI and UA components

Static vs. Dynamic Help Contexts
UI components can define the associations between UI controls and help contexts, either statically or dynamically.
Dynamic Context-Sensitive Help
Since 3.1, Eclipse supports dynamic context-sensitive help.
Help Context Abstraction
Help context abstraction is a technique to simplify the handling of help context IDs and help search expressions in the UI code, by abstracting them to “help keys.”