# Introduction to Context-Sensitive Help

Context-sensitive help is focused user assistance content, specific to the current application context (that is, the help context), and presented on demand when a platform-specific trigger is activated (for example, F1 on Windows).

Context-sensitive help requires interactions between user interface (UI) components, user assistance (UA) components, and the Eclipse platform help system.

UI components:

- Contribute UI controls
- Define the association of help contexts with UI controls

UA components:

- Contribute context-specific help content and online documentation content
- Define the association of help contexts with context-specific help content and related online documentation topics

Eclipse help system:

- Resolves help context references to matching context-specific help contributions
- Contributes the help presentation mechanisms (for example, the Help view)
- Provides API to enable context-sensitive help interactions for UI and UA components

- Static vs. Dynamic Help Contexts
  UI components can define the associations between UI controls and help contexts, either statically or dynamically.
- Dynamic Context-Sensitive Help
  Since 3.1, Eclipse supports dynamic context-sensitive help.
- Help Context Abstraction
  Help context abstraction is a technique to simplify the handling of help context IDs and help search expressions in the UI code, by abstracting them to “help keys.”