Customise message for See Also button

[Amebr-ke0mH4]

Hi all,

I think I remember seeing a post/article somewhere about customising the message that appears when no topics are associated with the See Also keywords linked to a button. But of course I can't find that reference anywhere.

Does this ring any bells with anyone?

More Details
Create a See Also button linked to keyword "MyList" in Project A.
"MyList" exists in Project B (slave of A), which is not available on the user's system.
Clicking on the button displays the message "Selection is not associated with any topics, please try another selection".

Thanks for any help,
Amber

[Pete_Lees]

Hi Amber,

That message is a standard Microsoft message, embedded in one of the HTML Help runtime components (probably hhctrl.ocx) and not customizable. There are ways to work around this, however.

According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/vsconOcxalink.asp, you should be able to use a Default Topic parameter to specify an alternative topic to navigate to when a keyword lookup fails. I have never managed to get this to work, but using the equivalent facility in a Related Topics control does work. For example, you might set up the control like this:

<object id="hhctrl" classid="clsid:adb880a6-d8ff-11cf-9377-00aa003b7a11">
<param name="Command" value="Related Topics">
<param name="Button" value="Text:Related Topics">
<param name="Item1" value=";ms-its:projectb.chm::/topic1.htm;topic_not_found.htm">
</object>

where topic1.htm is the target topic in projectb.chm, and topic_not_found.htm is the topic to display if topic1.htm cannot be found.

Better still, you could try Rob Cavicchio's conditional link method, described here:

http://www.mshelpwiki.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=HTMLHelpTipMergedConditionalLinks

Pete

[RoboWizard]

Hi Pete

Good to see you are still lurking about!

You mention some possible irregularity with the default topic in a see also? I recall a project where I used 24 of them extensively on a "What's new, What's changed" page to easily manage communicating new and changed info to my users. I never recall seeing a failure there. However, I should also temper that with the fact that I never produced this project as a compiled .CHM file. It was always WebHelp. So perhaps there is the difference. The WebHelp generation process probably was flawless in converting the attribute to the WebHelp equivalent.

Cheers... Rick

[Pete_Lees]

Hi Rick,

quote:

---

You mention some possible irregularity with the default topic in a see also? I recall a project where I used 24 of them extensively on a "What's new, What's changed" page to easily manage communicating new and changed info to my users. I never recall seeing a failure there. However, I should also temper that with the fact that I never produced this project as a compiled .CHM file. It was always WebHelp. So perhaps there is the difference.

---

Yes, I think so. To the best of my knowledge, the compiled HTML Help functionality has always been broken. Hope someone will prove me wrong about that, though.

Pete

[Amebr-ke0mH4]

Thanks for your help.

I'll definitely try out that conditional link method.

Amber