Context Sensitive Help - How
it's doneContext Sensitive Help - How
it's doneContext Sensitive Help (CSH) has long been a bit of a mystery to many help authors. The information inside this topic is intended to help you discover that there is no real mystery involved with creating a Context Sensitive help system that will be linked to an application.
The Salesbuilder sample project has been supplied so that you may make changes to it, recompile it and install it on your PC in order to actually test the CSH mappings and experience first hand how this works.
Thought the CSH workflow principles are the same, this Salesbuilder project has been created to work specifically with a sample AIR application made available by Adobe Systems. The AIR application name is Salesbuilder. This application is not installed by default when RoboHelp is installed. It is your job to install the Salesbuilder AIR application if you wish to see how this works. After you install Salesbuilder, you then install the Salesbuilder AIR Help application to supply the help. Once both have been installed, you should then be able to test the Context Sensitive help by opening various screens in Salesbuilder and pressing F1 or clicking the Help icons.
CSH works by establishing a connection between the application and the help. Commonly, a small text file known as a "Map" file is involved. This file is usually a basic text file that stores a unique identification number along with the topic that should be assigned to this identification number. Think of how a map of the world would work. Your goal is to arrive at a specific destination. So you use a map to plot the beginning and ending points. That's precisely how a map file works. Each exit point from the application is assigned a unique identifier. That unique identifier is then associated with a destination topic.
In Adobe RoboHelp, you establish the connections by opening the Project Set-up pod and expanding the Context-Sensitive Help folder. Inside this folder you should see the Map Files folder. Expand the Map Files folder. During the creation of this sample project, the Map Files folder was right-clicked and the option to create a new map file was selected. This file was named salesbuilder. If you examine the Map Files folder in this project, note that a file named salesbuilder.h is listed.
To view the existing connections, double-click the All Map IDs item and the Edit Map IDs dialog should present itself. From there, observe the entries that appear below. There should be no need to make any changes within this dialog.
Because creating CSH is a bit of a "closed loop" between the application developer and the help author, it is impossible to allow you to create new topics and assign them to new Map IDs, then see this in actual use.
In Adobe RoboHelp (2015 release), CSH can be created without any involvement from the Application Developer.
In order to use this feature the application must have been developed using the C++ programming language. The process begins by clicking File > Context Sensitive Help > Open Application... From there the RoboHelp author chooses an EXE file created using C++. RoboHelp should open the application where you may establish the mappings.