Pre-built documentation index

When user searches help contents of a product, the search is performed within a documentation index.  By default, this index  is created on the first invocation of help search, but can be pre-built and delivered to the user with a product.  This avoids indexing from occurring on the user machine and lets user obtain first search results faster.

Building an index for a product

To build an index follow the steps:

For example, running

eclipse -nosplash -application org.eclipse.help.indexTool -vmargs -DindexOutput=d:/build/com.my.plugin -DindexLocale=en

will result in file doc_index.zip being saved in the nl/en directory that will be created under d:/build/com.my.plugin.  The zip will contain index of contents of documents that are available to users when they run the product in the en locale.

Packaging and Installation of pre-built index

Pre-built indices, the doc_index.zip files, need to be packaged as a plug-in.   You can choose to use a plug-in associated with the primary feature, or choose to package the index for each language into separate fragments.

For example, if product's documentation is available in two languages, say English and German, a plug-in com.my.plugin can have the following structure:
com.my.plugin/
plugin.xml
nl/
de/
doc_index.zip
en/
doc_index.zip
other files of this plugin

The ID of the plugin needs to be specified as a productIndex preference for org.eclipse.help plugin.  For plugin in the above example, the plugin_customization.ini file needs to contain the entry
org.eclipse.help/productIndex=com.my.plugin


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