Hit counter possible?

[Fin_MBC]

Hi,
My company is about to purchase a RoboHelp license to publish documentation for one of our business systems. We're writing the content in MS Word at the moment. RoboHelp has been used at my company in the past and I believe the output is in HTML Help format, so that's probably what I'll be using.

My question is, will it be possible to include the code snippet needed for a page hit counter onto each page of my help? (There will be about 600 pages total in the help). We'd really like to know what content users are accessing. The HTML Help file will be accessed over the intranet so every user will be connected to the internet. Or perhaps there is a better way to do this?

I think this type of analysis functionality is included in RoboHelp Pro, but I don't think we'll get approval to buy that version.

Just trying to find out ahead of time if this is possible so I can advise my manager.

Thanks, Mark.

[Guest]

Hi, Mark. Welcome to the forums.

I think you have two good reasons not to use the HTMLHelp format at all:

1) HTMLHelp .chm files do not work well over an intranet because their active content distresses Windows security. There are workarounds for this, but the bottom line is that .chm files were designed to reside on the user's PC. RoboHelp's proprietary WebHelp format is intended for inter/intranet distribution.

2) It's a lot easier to put code bits into WebHelp, including global ones. RoboHelp's interface has a tendency to chew on added code, but there are ways to work around that both before and after generating the WebHelp output. The thing that makes it easier is that WebHelp output is essentially a little Web site that comprises a bunch of HTML files for the topics plus the support files to display them in the user's browser. Sticking code snippets into the individual topic HTML files is easier than playing with the compiled .chm format.

I would suggest to your boss that you get the RH Office license and use the RoboHelp for HTML 'flavor' to produce WebHelp output. You can import your Word documents into RoboHelp for HTML, which will produce an HTML source file for each topic - then you can experiment with adding the code to the source files or (if it doesn't work) to the output files.

I hope someone else can provide some useful code for the hit counter - anybody?

My .02 USD,
Elisa