Eclipse Content Provider

The Eclipse Content Provider is a new function in IBM DITA toolkit Release 1.1 tool. In former releases, you should transform DITA files to HTMLs before you build them into Eclipse help output. With the Eclipse Content Provider, you do not need to transform DITA files to HTMLs beforehand. This new function will preprocess DITA files and dynamically transform them into HTMLs at runtime.

During the building process, the Eclipse Content Provider generate plugin.xml. The file plugin.xml provides the definition of one or more tables of contents and locate the contents to display.

Here is an example of creating an output for the Eclipse Content Provider and view the output in specially designed Eclipse on Windows XP.
  1. Create a directory c:\dita-ot as the output directory for DITA mapfiles.
  2. Start the command line interface by choosing Start > Run.
  3. Switch to the directory c:\dita-ot.
  4. Enter the following command to build:
    java -jar lib\dost.jar /i:samples/sequence.ditamap 
          /outdir:out /transtype:eclipsecontent 
  5. Then view all the files under c:\dita-ot and copy these files to the corresponding directory under the plugin directory for Eclipse.
  6. Call the specially designed Eclipse to view the output.