Including your own documentation in the CICS Explorer

If your organization has system operating processes and procedures, you might want to include them in the CICS Explorer Help Contents so they are available while using the CICS Explorer. You can create your own documentation plug-in and integrate it fully with the CICS Explorer Help Contents, or as an interim step, you can integrate existing HTML and text files with the CICS Explorer Help search function.

Creating a plug-in

The CICS Explorer is built on the Eclipse open source platform which provides an extensible integrated development environment. Using the Eclipse platform, anyone can build tools that integrate seamlessly with the environment and other tools. The key to the seamless integration of tools with Eclipse is the plug-in. With the exception of a small runtime kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. This means that a plug-in you develop integrates with Eclipse, and so with the CICS Explorer, in exactly the same way as other plug-ins.

When you create a documentation plug-in, it is fully integrated with the CICS Explorer, and the contents are displayed in the Help Contents.

You can create your own documentation plug-in using the Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) which is available in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The Eclipse IDE is open source and can be downloaded from the Eclipse Web site http://www.eclipse.org. The documentation explains how to get started, and a cheat sheet is provides step-by-step instructions for creating a plug-in.

Integrating HTML and text files with the CICS Explorer Help search

If you have not yet created a documentation plug-in, but you have HTML or text files that you want to access in the CICS Explorer, you can place the files in a special folder so that they can be included in the CICS Explorer search index. When you perform a search for help information, any matches with your documentation are displayed along with the CICS Explorer results. However when you view the Help Contents, your documents will not appear.

This method of integrating HTML and text files is only intended as an interim solution until you create a documentation plug-in.

To include your HTML or text files in the CICS Explorer Help search, perform the following steps:

  1. Click Help > Manage Custom Documentation from the workbench menu. The file manager opens a window on your desktop showing the contents of the mydocs folder in the CICS Explorer.
  2. Copy any HTML or text files that you want to include in the CICS Explorer and paste them in the mydocs folder.
  3. Close the mydocs window.
  4. Click Help > Re-create Search Index from the workbench menu. A dialog is presented asking for confirmation. The operation requires that the CICS Explorer is re-started.
  5. Click OK to proceed, or click Cancel if you don't want to re-start the CICS Explorer at this time. You must perform the re-create step for the files to be included in the Help search.

When the CICS Explorer re-starts, any Help search you perform will now search your own documentation as well as the CICS Explorer documentation. Any results found in your own documentation are listed before results found in the CICS Explorer documentation.

Note: When search results are found in HTML files, the file name in the <Title></Title> tags is displayed. However text files do not include title tags, so results in text files display the filepath as shown in this screen capture A screen capture of search results showing results in customer's own documentation at the top of the results. The first two results have proper titles because they are in HTML files. The next 3 results show the file paths, as they are text files..