Tool Mentor: Using Extended Help with the RUP Website
Purpose
Every Rational tool in Rational Suites has Extended Help. This
selection from the help menu of the tool provides process guidance to
practitioners based on the tool that they are in and where they are in the tool.
This section provides links to additional information related to this tool mentor.
Overview
The following steps are performed in this tool mentor:
From the Help menu of your Rational tool, select Extended Help. If it
does not appear, or is grayed out, Extended Help is not enabled for your
computer. This is likely because your Rational tool was not purchased and
installed as part of a Rational Suite.
When you invoke Extended Help a dialog will appear. It will contain a
list of all RUP configurations that you have looked at, and ask you for the one
you would like to use for process guidance. You can make this choice the
default.
The RUP browser will appear, with a new process view tab in the
foreground. It will be named 'Extended Help - <toolname>' and
contain the fifteen topics of greatest relevance to the context within the
tool, a 'More Content' folder with rest of the topics in decreasing order of
likelihood and an option to relaunch the dialog to select a RUP configuration
for Extended Help.
It is very likely the the information you need is one of the first topics in
the Extended Help tab. If tool mentors exist for the tool, they will
likely appear in the first fifteen. If your review of these topics doesn't
show you what you are interested in, you can open the 'More Content' folder and
see the rest of the topics, in decreasing order of relevance.
Extended Help will be specific to the RUP configuration you have
chosen. This enables you to get only the guidance that pertains to the
project you are working on.
At any time, you can switch to one of the other process views or to one of
your Personal Process View or My RUP tabs to get further information.
When the RUP browser is shut down, any Extended Help tabs that have been
created during the session are deleted. If you would like to save a
particular Extended Help tab for later review, you can use the Personal Process View or My RUP feature to
save it under a different name. Click on the 'SaveAs' button on the tree
control tool bar and give in any name you would like.
A useful hint is that as you review topics you can either drag them into a
'Reviewed' Folder, or just delete them. This will provide you with a means
of keeping track of what you wish to review. Similarly, you can reorganize
the elements in your saved Personal Process View or My RUP tab by dragging them around or moving them up
and down.
If you realize that you are looking at Extended Help in the context of the
wrong RUP configuration, say for a large business modeling project when you are
currently working on a small J2EE project, you can select a different RUP
configuration to get process guidance from.
At the bottom of the Extended Help tree control there is a 'Select Other
Extended Help' element. Choosing it relaunches the RUP selection
dialog.
Extended Help is based entirely on the process selections that have been made
in RUP Builder. Any selected plug-ins or process components will be
indexed for use by the context engine underlying Extended Help. To get
more plug-ins, you can visit the RUP Plug-in Exchange on the Rational Developer
Network (www.rational.net). Alternately, you can create your own process
plug-ins using the Rational Process Workbench also known as RPW, a component of
RUP that is available for download from the Rational Developer Network.
All the guidance required for this is on the exchange and in the process
guidance that comes with RPW.
For additional information on creating RUP plug-ins that add topics to extended
help, see the Process Engineering Process (PEP). The PEP is a RUP-like
process that provides guidance in the area of process engineering. It is included
with the Rational Process Workbench,
available for download from the Rational
Developer NetworkSM.
|