Developing application Help

For window-level Help, all you need to do is create the Help topics in the WYSIWYG Editor and save them as normal HTML topics (.HTM files). Your developer gives you map files (or the program can automatically generate them for you). These simple text files contain basic information about components in the application. They are identified by topic IDs and map numbers. At an easy-to-use dialog, you simply select the window-level topic that explains how to use a component in the application and match it to a topic ID. This basic task is known as creating an alias. You create aliases for all the window-level topics in your project. The only thing you do after that is test your topics in the application.

For What's This? Help, you create and author brief text-only topics at the same time that you link the topic IDs to each text topic. Or, you can use What's This? Help Composer (included with this program) to create the topics.

Use any of the excellent tools included with this program for compiling, testing and debugging projects. While you are compiling Microsoft HTML Help projects, you can view instant feedback about your project files in the Compilation pane. For example, it reports errors about topic content, missing files, problems with topic IDs and context-sensitive Help topics, problems with the index or contents file, and broken links. This information can help you quickly debug problems to successfully compile. If your project includes broken links in the table of contents, index or topics, you can identify them and easily fix them.

You can also use BugHunter*, a handy tool for testing context-sensitive topics that are part of HTML-based Help projects. You can monitor calls to Help and quickly diagnose problems that can occur. It's useful for testing Help buttons, F1 Help and What's This? Help in applications to ensure that the correct topics open. It also helps you trace the causes of error messages to resolve problems, discover why the wrong topic opens, determine if a particular map number is used and find out if a window-level Help topic has an alias.

*The availability of BugHunter depends on the Help authoring package you are using.