Context-Sensitive Neophyte Questions

[Guest]

Hi,

I am really confused by this whole topic. I've never created (well, not in many years, and with another product) context-sensitive help at all. I'm being restricted to using RH6, MS Word, and my developers are using C# to create the application. Can I get a 1-2-3 on what steps I need to accomplish to do this (if I even can)? If I must upgrade my RH software to a server version, or whatever, please include that information, as well?

Thanks,
Andy

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum

Any topic is potentially a context sensitive topic. Context sensitive simply means a topic the developers call that relates to where the user is in the system. It can be field level or screen level. As long as the topic relates to the part of the application from which it is called, it is context sensitive. The same topic could be called from the TOC by the user, but then it would not necessarily be context sensitive.

As such it is the developers issue how they call the appropriate topics but you have to work with them to agree how it is going to be done. There are some topics about calling webhelp, if that is your output, on my site.

There is a recent thread about calling CHM help on this forum.

[Pete_Lees]

Hi, Andy,

There are several ways for C# developers to pass context help calls to a .chm file but, in summary, each call can specify one of the following:

• 
  
• A map number (also known as "context integer"). So, you or your developers would need to generate a map file that associates each map number with a topic ID. You would then import the map file into your RoboHelp project and assign the topic IDs to individual help topics.
  
  See the following page for more details:
  
  http://help.adobe.com/en_US/RoboHelp/RHTML/7.0/Context-sensitive/About_context-sensitive_help.htm
  
  
• The name of an HTML topic file that you have compiled into the .chm file. So, you'd need to let your developers know what your topic file names are.
  
  
• An index keyword that you have associated with a help topic. So, you'd need to let your developers know what the keywords are.
  

These are effectively the same options as were available to developers working in earlier programming environments. The map number method is probably the most widely used.

Any help authoring tool that is capable of outputting a .chm file can be used to create the help for a C# application.

Here are some articles that explain how to connect a .chm file to a .NET application from the developer's perspective:

• 
  
• http://helpware.net/mshelp2/demo2/h1xNET.htm. (Doesn't describe the map number technique, which Microsoft added to .NET some time after the article was published.)
  
  
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.helpnavigator.aspx. (Microsoft's description of the HelpNavigator enumeration and of the TopicId member, used in the map number technique.)
  
  
• http://www.help-info.de/en/Visual_Basic_net/vbnet_htmlhelp.htm. (Written by a Visual Basic user, but should still be of value to C# developers.)
  
  
• http://www.mshelpwiki.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=HTMLHelpArticles. (The "Microsoft C#" and "Microsoft VS .NET" sections provide links to a number of useful articles.)
  

Pete

[Guest]

Thanks to all. I'm reading the stuff that I think I can understand, and I've sent the links to the developer who's working on this project. One of our problems is that I'm in New York, but my home office is in Washington state...

So, we've both got a lot of reading to do!

Andy