# In-tool Help

Developers can provide in-tool help for users that will be displayed in the GUI. There are several changes that need to be made to a channel in order to provide in-tool help. Node schemas need two additional attributes, the channel documentation directory needs to be updated, and markdown and image files need to be added for nodes,.

### Schema Attributes

There are two schema attributes for in-tool help. Note that both of these attributes are optional. If they are not present in the schema then no help will be provided.

The 'help' attribute is a reference to a markdown file that provides help when the user clicks on the "i" symbol in the upper right corner of the node icon. This attribute is structured as follows: \<package>/\<markdown.md> where the 'package' is the name of the package containing the help file, and 'markdown.md' is the name of the markdown file.

The 'thumbnail' attribute is a reference to a PNG file that is an image to be displayed when the user hovers over the node name in the node tray. This attribute is structured as follows: \<package>/\<thumbnail.png> where 'package' is the name of the package containing the thumbnail, and 'thumbnail.png' is the name of the PNG file.

Here is an example of a schema that specifies both a help file and a thumbnail attribute.&#x20;

```
  Tank:
    inputs: []
    outputs:
    - name: Generator
      description: Object generator
    tooltip: Abrams Tank AFV
    help: satrgb/Tank.md
    thumbnail: satrgb/Tank.png
    category: Generators
    color: "#cc1414"
    subcategory: AFV
```

The help file is called 'Tank.md' and it is stored in the 'satrgb' package. The thumbnail is 'Tank.png' and it is stored in the 'satrgb' package.

### Channel Documentation Directory Changes

With this update we force channel developers to name their channel documentation file “channel.md“ that is included in the docs/ directory at the top-level of the channel. Other assets can be included in that docs/ directory and will be referenced from the channel.md file. File references are relative to the docs/ directory so subdirectories can be included if desired. An example is this snippet showing an example output image in the channel.md file.

```
![Example Output](output/image.png)
```

The image will be located in docs/output/image.png of the channel repository.

### Channel Structure

The channel directory structure supports the inclusion of documentation assets. Here is an example of the structure:

```
docs/
  |- channel.md
  |- image1.png
packages/
  |- satrgb/
    |- satrgb/
      |- docs/
        |- __init__.py
        |- node1.md
        |- node1.png
        |- node2.md
        |- node2.png
```

The top-level docs directory contains the channel’s documentation file, channel.md along with any supporting assets required by the markdown file. The package documentation should be self-contained within the package, included in a packages///docs directory as mentioned above.

Note that the package docs directory must include an empty "\_\_init\_\_.py" file so that the Python package manager can find it.

### Channel Deployment

The anadeploy process uses the anautils command to compile the documentation assets into a directory structure that can be used by the channel deployment service.  The compiled assets directory looks like this:

```
docs/
  channel/
    |- channel.md
    |- image1.png
    |- video1.gif
  packages/
    |- anatools/
      |- docs/
    |- satrgb/
      |- docs/
```

Note the anautils command is automatically run by the anadeploy process so this information is for reference purposes only.

If there is something wrong with the documentation, such as a misspelled md or png file reference, then the channel deployment process will fail. It is a good idea to check the validity of your documentation before running anadeploy. To do this, you run the anautils command by hand as follows:

```
anautils --mode=help --output=/tmp/
```

This will check the validity of your links and compile the documentation into the temp directory. If there is something wrong with your documentation, you will receive an error message.