Context sensitive help is help set up to open at a topic relevant to the field or screen that the user is viewing. This article provides an overview of the way context sensitivity works in WebHelp and FlashHelp generated by RoboHelp. This article shows you how you can create URLs to call your help context sensitive. This allows you to create your own context sensitive help calls and allows you to create your own API. I focus on developers and others who want to know what options are available to them. I assume you have some experience with RoboHelp and WebHelp as I will be using default RoboHelp terminology.
If you are looking for a quick tutorial to get working with context sensitive WebHelp or the default RoboHelp APIs, see Calling WebHelp on Peter Grainge's site and the article Providing Context-Sensitive Help for Web Applications by John Daigle. I also have some custom APIs and test applications available for context sensitive help:
With any of the above APIs you don't need to go through this article to unleash the power of context sensitivity in RoboHelp. Every API contains detailed documentation that will get you working with context sensitivity in minutes.
Note:
- I tested the methods provided on this page with RoboHelp 7, 8 and 9. It may work for other versions, but I haven't tested that.
- FlashHelp works exactly the same as WebHelp. In all the subarticles, I will omit 'FlashHelp' and use only the term 'WebHelp'.
- This article's focus is solely on WebHelp. Calling WebHelp Pro using the RoboHelp Server is different from 'regular' WebHelp.
- If you have opened a WebHelp project in your browser and you feed a context sensitive URL into the address bar, the call may fail. There are two solutions to this:
- First navigate to another URL such as http://www.google.com and then try the URL again.
- Amend the call to avoid conflict. See the table at the start of http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/calling_webhelp/using_urls.htm for more information.