About local help pages¶

The makehelp command generates the local help pages of a Lino site, that is, a set of static html pages in your /media/cache/help directory (from where your web server will serve them). These pages are Lino’s answer to clicking on the ? button.

The local help pages system is based on a few conventions.

Database models and data tables are documented as autodoc directives using simplified naming.

simplified naming¶

The convention to document everything in the global name space of the models.py file of a plugin without the submodule that implements it.

For example when we say lino.modlib.users.User, lino.modlib.users.Users or lino.modlib.users.UserTypes, then we ignore the face that these classes are actually defined in different modules.

The local help pages make heavy use of intersphinx to refer to other documentation websites. That’s why makehelp requires these other websites to be online when building the local docs.

For every plugin of an application, the developer must provide a ref target with end-user documentation about this plugin.

Side note: Code snippets (lines starting with >>>) in this document get tested as part of our development workflow. The following initialization snippet tells you which demo project is being used in this document.

>>> import lino
>>> lino.startup('lino_book.projects.min1.settings')
>>> from lino.api.doctest import *

>>> rt.models.users.User
<class 'lino.modlib.users.models.User'>

>>> rt.models.users.Users
lino.modlib.users.ui.Users

>>> rt.models.users.UserTypes
lino.modlib.users.choicelists.UserTypes