I have successfully created an online help in my application using JavaHelp. At the first step I have created the example from JavaHelp so I had the typical menu with animal information.
In the next step I changed all the hs, xml, and jhm and created new ones to have a skeleton of the help system of my application and not anything about animal kingdom. Of course, I had to create the html pages, I just created the page, inserted some foo data and leave it like that. My next step was to create the actual help pages, but due to time and budget constraints some other people are going to do this part. The last step in the plan is to index the help system to have the search functionality available, for this I have read that I need to use the java indexer and then it would create be some files in a new folder called JavaHelpSearch. Since I already have the skeleton, but not actually any real data in the html pages my question is:
Can I index now the JavaHelp so I can have the search functionality finished even though I don’t have real html pages? Or do I need to wait to index the JavaHelp to when they send me the html pages?
In other words, does the JavaHelp indexer needs the html pages to index or it is ok to index with just the skeleton of the JavaHelp and then change the content of the html pages?
Can I index now the JavaHelp so I can have the search functionality finished even though I don’t have real html pages? Or do I need to wait to index the JavaHelp to when they send me the html pages?
You'll have to wait. The indexer needs the content of the real HTML pages. There's really no point in creating the search database before you have all the HTML content.