Opening Custom Help Forms in Doc Assistant

You can create personalized SKILL GUI objects (forms and windows) to work with Cadence tools. To include the related help documents for such GUI objects in Doc Assistant:

1. Set an application name and a tag name for the GUI object: The Cadence tool passes these names to the Doc Assistant. These names are used to look up for the document to be opened.
   Examples:
   The SKILL code for a graphics window is:
   hiCreateWindow(’default "graphics" "myApp" "myWindowTag")
   Here, myApp is the application name and myWindowTag is the tag name for this window.
   The SKILL code for a form is:
   hiCreateAppForm( ?help ’("myApp" "myFormTag")
...)
   Here, myApp is the application name and myFormTag is the tag name for this form.
2. Create a local document directory install_dir/local/doc: This directory holds the document files. Here, install_dir is the directory where you installed the Cadence software.
   Doc Assistant searches for the required documents in install_dir/local/doc followed by install_dir/doc, where the Cadence user manuals are installed.
3. Create the required HTML documentation files and save them to the install_dir/local/doc directory: For example, you can create local/doc/myDocument/myDocument.html. To open an HTML document from a specific location, place a <a name="anchorname"> </a> anchor in the HTML code at that location.
   If a document resides in local/doc, you can add tags to the HTML document so that it appears in the documentation browser.
4. Create a directory in local/doc that matches the tool application name. For example, you can create the directory local/doc/myApp.
5. Create a tag file: In the local/doc/application_name directory, create an application_name.tgf file. This is a simple ASCII file.
   For example, you can create an ASCII file local/doc/myApp/myApp.tgf.
6. Add a list of pointers to the tag file: In the tag file, include a list of pointers to each function tag name and the path to the HTML file to be opened when the user clicks Help.
   Entries in each line of the tag must be in the following format:
   tagname path_to_document optional_anchorname filetype
   Examples:
   Include the following in myApp.tgf:
   myWindowTag $myDocument/myDocument.html "" HTML
   Here, Doc Assistant first looks in the standard document directories for a directory named myDocument. "" indicates that there is no <a name="anchorName"></a> to jump within myDocument.html.
   
   To anchor a point <a name="myFormAnchor"></a> in your document, include the following in myApp.tgf:
   myFormTag $myDocument/myDocument.html "myFormAnchor" HTML

If you have placed your documentation in a directory outside the Cadence hierarchy, you must enter the complete path name to the directory or a path name relative to the install_dir/doc directory. If the document is located in /usr1/customDocs/myDocument, the tag entry includes:
myFormTag /usr1/customDocs/myDocument/myDocument.html "myFormAnchor" HTML

The previous steps outline the procedure to create a document in install_dir/local/doc that is readable to all users who use your Cadence installation.

To ensure that a document is visible only to you, create it either in your $HOME directory (on LINUX) or in the %userprofile%\doc directory (on Windows), rather than in local/doc. The argument used to point to this directory in the tag $dirname is the same in either case.

Related Topics

Working with a Tag File

Documentation Lookup Order

How to use CSF search mechanism