Integrating text and HTML files

If your organization has system operating processes and procedures that are not yet in a documentation plug-in, but they exist as text or HTML files and you want to access them in the CICS® Explorer, you can place the files in a special folder so that they are included in the CICS Explorer search index.

The documents will not appear in the Help Contents, but when you perform a search for help information, any matches with your documentation are displayed along with the CICS Explorer results.

This method of integrating HTML and text files is only intended as an interim solution until you create a documentation plug-in.

To include your text or HTML files in the CICS Explorer™ Help search, perform the following steps:

  1. Click Help > Manage Custom Documentation from the workbench menu. The file manager opens a window on your desktop showing the contents of the mydocs folder in the CICS Explorer.
  2. Copy any text or HTML files that you want to include in the CICS Explorer and paste them in the mydocs folder.
  3. Close the mydocs window.
  4. Click Help > Re-create Search Index from the workbench menu. A dialog is presented asking for confirmation. The operation requires that the CICS Explorer is re-started.
  5. Click OK to proceed, or click Cancel if you don't want to re-start the CICS Explorer at this time. You must perform the re-create step for the files to be included in the Help search.

When the CICS Explorer re-starts, any Help search you perform will now search your own documentation as well as the CICS Explorer documentation. Any results found in your own documentation are listed before results found in the CICS Explorer documentation.

Note: When search results are found in HTML files, the file name in the <Title></Title> tags is displayed. However text files do not include title tags, so results in text files display the filepath as shown in this screen capture A screen capture of search results showing results in customer's own documentation at the top of the results. The first two results have proper titles because they are in HTML files. The next 3 results show the file paths, as they are text files..