Overview 

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.

The following steps are performed in this tool mentor:

• Invoke Extended Help
• Review the Process Guidance
• Optional: Save Extended Help for Review
• Optional: Select a Different RUP Configuration
• Optional: Add More Topics to Extended Help
• More Information

Invoke Extended Help

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.

Review the Process Guidance

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 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.

Optional: Save Extended Help for Review

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.

Optional: Select a Different RUP Configuration

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. 

Optional: Add More Topics to Extended Help 

Extended Help is based entirely on the process selections that have been made in Rational Method Composer.  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).  

For More Information 

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.