Online Help

Online help is provided in the form of the User Manual and Technical Reference document which you are now reading. This information is accessible from within the Trace Analyzer application. The JavaHelp subsystem is used to present help content in a standard help browser. This document is also available from your favorite web browser. The starting point is the userman.html document in the docs subdirectory of your installation directory.

Flyover Help

Flyover help is available in the form of tool tips (if enabled in

Configure - Preferences). A tool tip is a brief description presented in a small window which temporarily hovers over a user interface component to explain its purpose. Tool tips are triggered by the mouse cursor stopping over a user interface component. They are context sensitive to the component currently under the mouse.

The Help Browser

The JavaHelp subsystem is used to provide online help from within the Trace Analyzer application. This subsystem provides a standard browser to present help documentation. The browser enables navigation through the help content via:

context sensitive help from within the application's user interface;
a table of contents whose topics are hyperlinked to the associated content documents;
an alphabetical index of topics which are hyperlinked to the assocated content documents;
a full text search interface which ranks search topics by applicability to the search keywords provided.

The following methods may be used to access the help browser from within the application:

From the Main Menu (if enabled in Configure - Preferences), select Help - General Help. This will display a standard help document in the JavaHelp browser.
Press the <F1> key from anywhere in the application to display context sensitive help content within the JavaHelp browser. The control which currently has the input focus determines the help content presented in the browser.
Click on one of the various Help pushbuttons displayed in dialog windows throughout the application. The content displayed will be relevant to the information presented in the dialog window from which the help browswer was launched.

Table of Contents Navigator

The browser's Table of Contents navigator view is depicted in Figure 1. This view is displayed by selecting the

Table of Contents notebook tab.

Figure 1. Table of Contents navigator view in help browser

The table of contents itself is depicted as a tree control, whose branches can be collapsed and expanded. Selecting any topic which is a leaf in the tree (i.e., one which has no subtopics which could be further expanded) hyperlinks to the topic's associated document. This document appears in the content viewer portion of the view, to the right of the table of contents. Some topics which are not leaves in the tree may also hyperlink to documents; others are provided for topical groupings only within the table of contents, and will have no associated help document.

Hyperlinks embedded within the current document can be followed by clicking on them, as with any HTML browser. As new documents are loaded into the viewer in this way, the selected topic in the table of contents will be updated accordingly.

Alphabetical Index Navigator

The browser's Alphabetical Index navigator view is depicted in Figure 2. This view is displayed by selecting the

Alphabetical Index notebook tab.

Figure 2. Alphabetical Index navigator view in help browser

The index is listed in alphabetical order by topic name. Subtopics are indented under a primary topic. Selecting a topic in the index list hyperlinks to the topic's associated document. This document appears in the content viewer portion of the view, to the right of the index list.

Full Text Search Navigator

The browser's Full Text Search navigator view is depicted in Figure 3. This view is displayed by selecting the

Search notebook tab.

Figure 3. Full Text Search navigator view in help browser

A search is initiated by typing the keywords of interest into the Find text field, then pressing <Enter>. If any result topics are found by the search, they are displayed in the list below the Find field, in order of potential relevance to the query keywords entered.

The red circle icon to the left of the topic name indicates the ranking of the match to the keywords entered. The more the circle is filled in with solid red, the higher the ranking of the match. The number to the right of this icon indicates the number of times the query was matched in the listed topic.

Selecting a topic in the search results list hyperlinks to the topic's associated document. This document appears in the content viewer portion of the view, to the right of the search results list. The query keywords are highlighted in the content viewer.