Coding Standards for Database Files › Coding Standards for Help Text › Designing Search Indexes

Designing Search Indexes

Help panels assist users who already know how and why to start a command or program. Search indexes provide users with a way of finding out how to do something in the first place. You should provide a help index for your application.

Provide search index entries for the keywords that a user may use. Provide

• entries for each command and each menu
• "how" entries for commonly required operations
• "what" entries for fundamental concepts
• OS/400 standard root keywords, for example How, What, Novice

  

• entries for common synonyms; for example create, make, and build

  

• an entry on how to use the search index itself

  

Do not distribute UIM :ISCH tags throughout the source of your panel groups. Restrict them to the source of the search index itself, and to the member or members containing standard entity definitions and hypertext tags. This means that you can recreate the search index without having to remove or add back all the other panel groups as entries.

The search index itself will need to contain help groups with outward references to any commands it needs to reference. Use dummy names with underscores for these help groups.