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Subject:RE: Robohelp (on the Developer's Side) From:david -dot- locke -at- amd -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sat, 25 Aug 2001 13:56:07 -0500
David Demyan said:
> You can use any convention you and your developer can agree
> on. You don't say whether you are developing WinHelp or HTML
> Help. If you are developing WinHelp, the string arp020001
> would go into the Topic Properties dialog for the related
> topic. Select the Advanced tab and enter the string into the
> field "Options: Map #:".
Actually, you and the developer only have to on two things: call by ID
number, and offsets for use case identification where panes or dialogs are
reused.
The IDs used in the help call are generated by the development environment.
They are put in the .h file. Include the .h file in your project. Insist
that the developers call by the ID number. Then, if you are in a WinHelp
project change the ID string in the .h file to match the topic's context
string, or define an alias between the ID string and the context string.
These do not need to be the same. I would go so far as to say should not be
the same. Always decouple your content from the developer's GUI.
In HTML Help, you have no option but to define the aliases.
Sometimes a developer will use a dialog to contain panels. The help button
will be on the dialog. In this case, the programmer must write some code, so
that the button uses the ID of the panel rather than the ID of the dialog.
Otherwise the development environment will automatically use the ID of the
dialog. Developers have also used the same panel in different dialogs. This
represents a different use case. Here you need to get the developers to add
an offset to the ID number. Then, you need to do the same in the .h file, so
you have something like 00001, 00101, 00201 where each ID number represents
one use case.
So, yes, the developer has to agree to use the call by number form, and to
use offsets in cases where reuse obscure the use case. Otherwise, stay
decoupled. I usually end up writing help before the developers get there, so
my topic ID strings are already defined. And, no, I'm not going to change
them. Alias the differences instead.
In HTML Help, you will also have to get the developer to override the help
call, so that it makes the call that displays .htm content rather than .txt
content. That ASCII-Only feature is useless.
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