Contextual Help

[Jamie Bodley-Scott]

I want my app to have contextual help so I can click a link and it takes me right into the correct topic in help.
I am using Integrated IFrames Blue Header Skin.
And I am using the URL ~/index.html?topic-name.htm. I get the correct highlight in the TOC on the left side but the message "Sorry, the page you are looking for is not found.".
If I just click the highlighted topic then the page loads fine.
I have an anchor set within the topic but clearly this does not work either. (~/index.html?topic-name.htm#myanchor)
What am i missing?

UPDATE......
If I leave the .htm out then I do get the topic to open. (Which seems not to be what the manual says????)
But sadly ~/index.html?topic-name#myanchor still does not take me to the anchor

[Tim Green]

Hi Jamie,

This definitely works, and you should NOT leave out the .htm extension. That would be an error and should not work at all. My guess is that the output file name is not what you are expecting, probably because of the hyphens. There may be different characters instead of the hyphens in your output files, depending on your Help & Manual settings. Have a look in your WebHelp output folder after publishing and check the actual name of the corresponding topic file created there.

If you are using the current version of Help & Manual 7 (7.0.6 Build 3732) you can select the character to be used to replace spaces and other non-HTML characters in topic IDs. The setting is in View > Program Options > Editor, it is called "Auto-replace blanks in topic IDs with character: ". You can choose any character but it's best to use only a hyphen (-) or underscore (_).

If you continue to have problems mail a demo project and a copy of the skin you are using to support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and we'll check it for you. Before doing anything else, however, please make sure that you are using the current version of Help & Manual 7. Since this is a new release, updates are going to be released quite frequently in the first period. You can check your installed version with Help > About. The current version is 7.0.6 Build 3732. If you need to update you can download the latest installer from

http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html?upd

Just install on top of your current version to update.

[Martin Wynne]

If I leave the .htm out then I do get the topic to open.

Hi Jamie,

In that case you may have changed the topic extension in the HTML Export Options:

hm_export_htm.png

regards,

Martin.

[Jamie Bodley-Scott]

Martin
I created a new project - real smple one.
The HTML export options on the new project appear as .html NOT .htm.
And if you use that it works fine.

[Martin Wynne]

I created a new project - real smple one.
The HTML export options on the new project appear as .html NOT .htm.

Hi Jamie,

So it does. That seems to be a change to the default in the latest version of H&M. I wonder why?

If you go to H&M's own Help at: http://help.ec-software.com/ the files are still .htm

regards,

Martin.

[Tim Green]

Hi Martin,

Help & Manual's own help files are set to that because that help was created a long time ago, so it already had the old setting. New help now defaults to .html instead of .htm in preparation for WebHelp 3, where there is no distinct "index.html" file any more. It still exists, but it is just the default topic. It is no longer a separate layout file. Instead, every topic contains the entire layout so every topic can be your starting-point, making it possible to have just the topic file name as your URL. After that, the content of other topics while browsing are loaded into the current page from compressed JSON copies. Since there is no longer any real distinction between index.html and any other topic file it now makes sense for them to all have the same extension.

This will be implemented first in the upcoming Premium Pack 3 skins due out in a few weeks.