16.5.17 Adding documentation

New documentation can be added in GPS in various ways. This is useful if you want to point to your own project documentation for instance.

The first possibility is to create a new menu, through a <menu> tag in an XML file, associated with an action that either spawn an external web browser or calls the internal GPS.Help.browse() shell command.

However, this will not show the documentation in the Help->Contents menu, which you also might want to do.

To have both results, you should use the <documentation_file> tag in an XML file. These tags are generally found in the gps_index.xml files, as documented in see Adding New Help Files, but you can in fact add them in any of your customization files.

The documentation files you display can contain the usual type of html links. In addition, GPS will treat specially links starting with '%', and consider them as script commands to execute instead of file to display. The following example show how to insert a link that will in effect open a file in GPS when clicked by the user

     <a href="%shell:Editor.editor g-os_lib.ads">Open runtime file</a>

The first word after '%' is the name of the language, and the command to execute is found after the ':' character.

The <documentation_file> accepts a number of child nodes:

name

This is the name of the file. It can be either an absolute file name, or a file name relative to one of the directories in GPS_DOC_PATH. If this child is omitted, you must specify a <shell> child.

This name can contain a reference to a specific anchor in the html file, using the standard HTML syntax.

            <name>file#anchor</name>

shell

This child specifies the name of a shell command to execute to get the name of the HTML file. This command can for instance create the HTML file dynamically, or download it locally using some special mechanism. This child accepts one attribute, "lang", which is the name of the language in which the command is written

descr

This is the description for this help file. It appears in a tool tip for the menu item.

category

This is used in the Help->Contents menu to organize all the documentation files.

menu

This is the full path to the menu. It behaves like a UNIX path, except it reference the various menus, starting from the menu bar itself. The first character of this path must be "/". The last part of the path is the name of the new menu item. If not set, no menu is displayed for this file, although it will still appear in the Help->Contents menu

The <menu> child tag accepts two attributes.

before (optional, default="")

The name of the menu before which the new entry should be inserted. If the new menu is inserted in some submenus, this tag controls the deeper nesting. Parent menus are created as needed, but if you wish to control their specific order, you should create them first with a <menu> tag.

after (optional, default="")

The name of the menu after which the new entry should be inserted.

The following example shows how to create a new entry "item" in the Help menu, that will display file.html. The latter is searched in the GPS_DOC_PATH list of directories.

     <?xml version="1.0"?>
     <index>
        <documentation_file>
           <name>file.html</name>
           <descr>Tooltip text</descr>
           <category>name</category>
           <menu>/Help/item</menu>
        </documentation_file>
     </index>

As mentioned above, HTML files are looked for through the GPS_DOC_PATH environment variable. However, you can also use the <doc_path> XML node to defined additional directories to be searched.

Such a directory is relative to the installation directory of GPS.

     <?xml version="1.0"?>
     <GPS>
        <doc_path>doc/application/</doc_path>
     </GPS>

will add the directory <prefix>/doc/application to the search path for the documentation.

Such a directory can also be added through Python, as in:

     GPS.HTML.add_doc_directory ('doc/application')