Progress
Help Development
Guide


Creating Topics for Context-sensitive Help

To create context-sensitive help topics, determine the application contexts that require help topics and create one help topic for each context. An application context is any currently displayed user-interface element that has input focus, for example, a window, dialog box, browse, button, combo-box, control frame, editor, fill-in, radio-set, selection-list, slider, and toggle box. There are two types of context-sensitive help:

For context-sensitive help topics to be called from the application interface, each topic must have a context ID, a unique identifying number. The context ID is paired with the topic ID in the Map section of the project file. (See "Mapping Context-sensitive Help Topics" in "Completing Help Systems," for more information on this process. )

If you are creating topics for context-sensitive help, you can integrate the help file with the application it document before you complete all the help topic text. You can create preliminary, empty topics called stubs, by inserting page breaks, giving each topic a title, and adding footnote control codes.

To complete the integration of context-sensitive help with the application, you need to provide a list of the help topic IDs and context IDs (from the Map section of the project file) to your development team to include in the calling interface for each context. Note that the development team does not need to use your topic ID, but must use the same context ID. Note that on some software development projects, the help author provides the context IDs and on other projects, the development team provides the context IDs.

As soon as you create the stubs, you can compile your help system, and provide the help system to include with the product for preliminary testing. (For information on compiling, see the "Compiling a Help Project" section in Completing Help Systems.")


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