Adding a New Javahelp Page to AUV Workbench

This is an advanced task for AUV Workbench developers. Discussion of details is welcome on the mailing list. The NPS team will help ensure that this integration proceeds correctly.

Building an HTML page for Javahelp

• Javahelp is the help system provided for Java used by the AUV Workbench.
• Javahelp uses HTML web pages for help documentation, but there are a few idiosyncracies to observe.
• Create a simple web page documenting some aspect of AUV Workbench use. A good way to do this is to copy an existing help page (such as this one).
• Note that complex HTML constructs or specialty proprietary tagsets will not work properly.
• Help pages for the AUV Workbench Javahelp system are saved in the javahelp/Pages subdirectory.
• Image links need to be in the javahelp/Pages/images subdirectory.
• Image formats need to be .png, .jpg or .gif.
• External links need to be handled specially since Javahelp does not provide thorough HTML support. We have created a special class internal to the AUV Workbench that covers this capability. Although it is not strict HTML, you can encode external links by prepending jhxtern: to a url, as follows:
  

  <a href="jhxtern:https://savage.nps.edu/AuvWorkbench>https://savage.nps.edu/AuvWorkbench</a>

Adding an HTML page to the Javahelp index

• Help pages are added to the index by providing updates to the following files.
• Add an index value matching the page title to the table of contents item (tocitem) entries in javahelp/AmvwHelpTOC.xml as shown in the following excerpt:
  

  <tocitem text="Software Development" expand="true">
   <tocitem text="Adding a New Javahelp Page" target="AddingNewJavahelpPage" />
   <tocitem text="Adding a New Vehicle" target="AddingNewVehicle" />
   <!-- etc. -->
</tocitem>

• Also add the index value matching the page file name to the mapping table javahelp/AmvwMap.jhm as shown in the following excerpt:
  

  <map version="2.0">
   <apID target="AddingNewJavahelpPage" url="Pages/AddingNewJavahelpPage.html" />
   <mapID target="AddingNewLocation" url="Pages/AddingNewLocation.html" />
   <!-- etc. -->

Testing the results

• Check in the new page to subversion
• Update the AUV Workbench source and then relaunch it
• Check the new help page for proper rendering and effective links
• For printing, there is still a Javahelp problem with AUVW help system. Instead you can go to the online subversion source listing to view and test and print the pages, if needed.

Back to the Help page index, the AUV Workbench: Introduction page, or online to AUV Workbench home page.