Dynamically Loading Information into a Help Topic

[dougpariswhite]

We have an application under development for which I need to provide Online Help.
The way this thing currently works is that relationships between applications and hosts are matched up in a layout based on status and influence. If a host is down, for example, certain applications are down; and clicking on a monitored component (an application, say) highlights the host(s)/server(s) in the layout to which it's related and dims everything else.

You can drill into a monitored object to get an understanding of how it's components might be impacting other objects.

Considering the dynamic nature of the application and the information it provides, I want to make the Online Help synchronously dynamic. We have a single Help button in the corner of the layout. I want to open that main topic and provide a list of appropriate topics; when the user clicks on a topic, instead of navigating to another topic, the Online Help loads the information into the open window. The loaded content may itself have links that, when clicked, I would want to load into the same main window.

It's something like an Ajax-kind of information retrieval.

It there any use of Flare features that might facilitate this kind of Online Help behavior?

Thanks beforehand for any comments.

Doug

[NorthEast]

I think my starting point would be to forget about Flare for the time being, and to speak to the web developers about how you would implement this as a normal website. Once I knew what methods we might want/need to use, I'd look at if/how that could be incorporated into the Flare project.

At the end of the day, Flare help outputs are just a set of (X)HTML topics with associated CSS, javascript, and other files. So if you work out how to do this for a website, then you'll know how to go about setting it up in a Flare project.

[dougpariswhite]

Thanks for the answer. I talked to a web developer and he described an implementation that would use JQuery to work with data that the application makes available based on changes to elements on the web page. So I'm now talking to the developer of the app proper to figure out what elements are instrumented and which ones can be.

In the meantime, I have realized that my initial questions were not posed well enough. So I'm revising the project scenario and objectives in case it might resemble something someone on the forum has already done:

We have an application under development for which I need to provide Online Help. The way this thing currently works is that relationships between monitored objects (applications, servers, hosts, storage LUNs and arrays, etc.) are matched up in rows on a page layout that shows status in terms of colors. If a host is down, for example, certain applications are down; and clicking on a monitored component (an application, say) highlights the other objects on the web page to which it's related, dimming everything else that has no relation. You can drill into a monitored object to get an understanding of how it's components might be impacting other objects.

Considering the dynamic nature of the application and the information it provides, we want to make the Online Help correlatively dynamic. We have a single Help button in the corner of the layout. If the user opens that main topic, we provide a list of appropriate topics; an easy use of the system. However, when the user drills into information provided in the user interface, and clicks Help from there, instead of loading the static list, we want the Online Help to load information that best fits the context. And if the user moves on within the app, we want the Online Help to change the available information to fit the new context.

Has anyone used Javascript with other Flare features to develop this kind of Online Help behavior?

Thanks again.

Thanks.

Doug

[RamonS]

Moving around in the application have a help button show relevant content is context sensitive help. I have the suspicion that this does not satisfy your needs, correct?
What is the outcome you are looking for? Is it showing the applicable static page that corresponds to what is shown in the app or is it dynamically compiling an entirely 'unique' topic that needs to take multiple parameters into account?

Context sensitive help allows for specifying one parameter (file name, alias, or map ID) that matches one static page or a bookmark on a static page. If you have any number of combinations of content then you look at an unmanageable amount of static pages to create and maintain. While can still use Flare to author the bits of content you may want to look at a CMS to get the dynamic part in. I can't think of one that easily does that, but I have little to no experience with CMS to begin with (worked with Drupal many years ago).