Providing Context-Sensitive Help /

Web Help Integration

You can integrate a Web Help system with your application or website and provide context-sensitive Help by creating links to the HTML files of topics directly, or by linking to the topic's Context or Id value.

Linking to a Topic File

The easiest way to display a specific topic in a Web Help system is to link to the topic's HTML file directly.

To get the URL address of a topic:

1.Open your Web Help system in a browser program.

2.In the Table of Contents pane, right-click on the topic to which you want to create a link.

3.In the popup menu, click the appropriate command (e.g. Copy Link) to copy the link to the Clipboard.

4.Now you can share the copied link with others (by pressing Ctrl+V), or insert it into an HTML page on your website (as explained below).

For example:

http://www.example.com/webhelp/topics/my-topic.htm

Linking to a Topic by Context

You can link to a topic in a Web Help system by using the topic's Context value.

Remark: The option to link to a topic by the Context value can be enabled (or disabled) in Web Help settings here.

For example:

http://www.example.com/webhelp/index.htm?context=10

where the context parameter specifies the Context value of the topic that you want to show.

Linking to a Topic by Textual Id

You can link to a topic in a Web Help system by using the topic's textual Id.

Remark: The option to link to a topic by the Id value can be enabled (or disabled) in Web Help settings here.

For example:

http://www.example.com/webhelp/index.htm?id=my_topic

where the id parameter specifies the textual Id of the topic that you want to show.

Linking to a Bookmark

If a topic contains a bookmark, you can also add this bookmark to the URL, so the browser will open the topic and automatically scroll to the bookmark location. The bookmark can be added to the URL string linking to a topic by filename, Context, or Id value.

For example:

http://www.example.com/webhelp/topics/my-topic.htm#bookmark

where bookmark is the name of bookmark within the topic, to which you want to scroll.

Displaying Search Results by a Keyword

A Web Help system allows you to display search results by a search keyword which can be passed as a URL parameter.

For example:

http://www.example.com/webhelp/index.htm?search=some%20keyword

where some%20keyword specifies the keyword that you want to find in the help system. If necessary, you can also pass the &match=phrase parameter to activate the Phrase Search mode.

Integration with a Web Page

On an HTML page of your website or web application, you can use regular hyperlinks to display a specific topic in your Web Help system. Below is an HTML code example that you can use to insert a hyperlink into the source of a web page.

For example:

<a href="http://www.example.com/webhelp/topics/my-topic.htm" target="_blank">Visit This Topic</a>

where the href parameter specifies the URL address linking to a topic as explained in the above examples.

Integration with a Windows Application

You can display a specific topic in a Web Help system from your Windows (Win32/64) application. In this case, you should pass the URL address linking to a topic to the WinAPI ShellExecute() function, so it will open the link in the default browser.

For more details on the ShellExecute() function, you can refer to the Windows SDK documentation.

Integration with a .NET Application

You can display a specific topic in a Web Help system from your .NET application. In this case, you should execute the URL address linking to a topic, so it will be opened in the default browser. Below is a code example that you can use in your .NET application.

For example:

string url="http://www.example.com/webhelp/topics/my-topic.htm";

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(url);