MDG Technologies Should Be Able to Add Help

[wikitect]

I'd like to be able to include with the deployed MDG technology some custom help for using my technology.

Ideally this would be added/unloaded when loading/unloading the MDG technology. Presumably it ought to be possible to make reference to a compiled help file or similar.

EA doesn't provide this capability and doesn't seem to provide help for some of the basic MDG technologies like SysML (try searching for 'block').

[«Midnight»]

This is one persistent hole in EA's extension mechanisms.

You can almost stitch something together by combining bits and pieces of functionality. But the results always fall (well) short of simply being able to specify a help file. Ideally, EA would let you set up topic references and such, but that's moot until you can set up the file itself.

I've experimented with this a bit. The results have not been encouraging. [NOTE: This does not mean you cannot do better. I just gave up when it became obvious that the best case fell well short of what was needed at the time.]

You can create an add-in that loads your technology. Or the add-in can remain dormant, listening to EA's events, until your technology is loaded. Either way, you can designate a help file when the technology loads. Note that your add-in has to keep track of this file; there is no place in EA itself to do this. You can then trap some events to look up topics in your help file.

Note that the only event (I can find) that purports to react to help requests is not what you really need. This event seems to fire only when the user presses F1 while an add-in (sub)menu pad has focus. Not very useful...

The best I was able to do was trap things like double-clicking a stereotyped element (I had to trap events for all elements and react to those that met my criteria) and 'divert' the event to a help request. There does not seem to be any way (again, that I found) to trap something like F1 when an element has focus (let alone capture information about which element it is).

Sigh...

David

PS: I did not register a feature request for this. At the time I had a large number of request open. The Sparxians did legion duty in addressing many of them (whether they implemented them or not), but it became apparent that I had saturated their tolerance at the time. The time frame of the requirement mandated using another solution (i.e. without EA). I've since moved on to other issues...

[wikitect]

Thanks, this has confirmed my suspicion that in the current incarnation it's just too hard to make it worth implementing.

Even a more Mac-like help system where help files belong to the system as a whole and are searchable across the whole collection from any app would be a compromise.