If your organization has system operating processes and procedures, you might want to include them in the z/OS® Explorer Help Contents so they are available while using the z/OS Explorer. You can create your own documentation plug-in and integrate it fully with the z/OS Explorer Help Contents, or as an interim step, you can integrate existing HTML and text files with the z/OS Explorer Help search function.
The z/OS 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 z/OS Explorer, in exactly the same way as other plug-ins.
When you create a documentation plug-in, it is fully integrated with the z/OS 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.
If you have not yet created a documentation plug-in, but you have HTML or text files that you want to access in the z/OS Explorer, you can place the files in a special folder so that they can be included in the z/OS Explorer search index. When you perform a search for help information, any matches with your documentation are displayed along with the z/OS 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 z/OS Explorer Help search, perform the following steps:
When the z/OS Explorer re-starts, any Help search you perform will now search your own documentation as well as the z/OS Explorer documentation. Any results found in your own documentation are listed before results found in the z/OS Explorer documentation.