What's This ? Help

[Guest]

I am creating help for a new web app.

They are requesting that I incorporate hover text on some fields, which I have not done using RH before.

What I have found in the help is pretty sparce, but says to start that you open the application exe within RH.

This is a web app so I don't have an exe.

Question is, can you do What's This help for a web application, and if so, can someone point me to more comprehensive instructions thatn there are in the RH help.

If not is there another way to incorporate hover text ?

Thanks

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

For a web app I'm thinking that this would fall squarely into the lap of the developer.

The way that the old What's This sort of help worked was that a text file was created containing the text strings. Since they are wanting hover help here, I'm thinking the simplest approach would be for the developer to simply add the required strings into whatever application s/he is using to create the app.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Guest]

Is it just me or is that a big flaw ? Why should the developers have to write the hover text.

Is there a backdoor method where I can provide them a file or files that they can pull into the app ?

Seems to me when I used Flare a couple years ago I could author hover text that was automatically linked to the app ...

[Peter Grainge]

I doubt that Flare provided What's This help for web applications. To the best of my recollection it was something for locally installed applications, and used by very few people at that as it was pretty naff.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[av_gchale]

I too am faced with a similar situation. I currently use RoboHelp to develop WebHelp for a web portal. The WebHelp system consists of context-sensitive main help topics (which are accessed by clicking a Help link at the top of each page in the web application) and context-sensitive field-level help topics (which are accessed by clicking a question mark icon next certain fields). For both main and field-level help topics, the web portal launches the appropriate help topic by calling a map ID which I provide.

We are embarking on a project to develop new apps that users can access from our web portal. The developers would like to replace the current method for calling field-level help topics. Instead of using a question mark icon that calls the appropriate map ID, the developers want to display the appropriate help text when the user hovers the cursor over a field label.

The developers have suggested that I will need to write the field-level help topics using their development tool (I believe they are using Liferay). I am concerned about authoring help topics using two different tools. If anyone has any thoughts, I would appreciate it.

Sincerely,

George

[Captiv8r]

Hi George

You might try authoring things in a text file and ask if your developers can break it up using some special delimiter they define.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks