Greetings,
I've encountered the following situation.
There's an application for which Flare context sensitive help is currently working. We'll call that application APP A. Within App A, there are functions that call a second application, which we'll refer to as APP B. The client wants context sensitive help for the dialog windows in both APP A and APP B.
This should all be well and good, except that the programmer's have reused some of the dialog window ID #'s from App A, in App B. This works for the functions within the Apps, because the programmer's use the full path for the each App within their functions. However, it leaves me with two different dialog windows (one for App A and one for App B) with identical ID numbers.
The programmers are what we might call "reluctant" to change the IDs, as they say they've used those IDs throughout the functions in both Apps, and it would take a lot of leg work for them to track down and change all the duplicated IDs.
So... I'm wondering if there's a way to specify the full path names (not to the Flare Help file, but to the App ID) within the Flare HELPID or Alias files? I haven't been able to find a way to do this yet myself.
Anyone have any suggestions or encountered any similar situation before?
Thanks,
Papa
Full path names for Flare context sensitive help?
Re: Full path names for Flare context sensitive help?
If both apps are pointing to the same help output, and the apps are using the same IDs, then your developers will have to change the identifiers that are being sent from the app.
If the developers are reluctant to change each individual ID, then I'd suggest they edit the code that makes the call to the help, so that it adds a prefix to the IDs.
For example, in App A you could prefix all IDs with "AppA_". So if the ID for a window is "Window5", then the app would add the prefix to the ID, so that it sends the identifier "AppA_Window5" to the help.
I'd expect they'll have a single function in their code that calls the help, so they only need to edit this bit of code, rather than edit all the IDs.
Then you would have to update your alias file to include the prefix on the identifiers.
If your developers still say they can't fix this easily, then they've not designed their code very well, and and can use this as an exercise to do the job properly.
If the developers are reluctant to change each individual ID, then I'd suggest they edit the code that makes the call to the help, so that it adds a prefix to the IDs.
For example, in App A you could prefix all IDs with "AppA_". So if the ID for a window is "Window5", then the app would add the prefix to the ID, so that it sends the identifier "AppA_Window5" to the help.
I'd expect they'll have a single function in their code that calls the help, so they only need to edit this bit of code, rather than edit all the IDs.
Then you would have to update your alias file to include the prefix on the identifiers.
If your developers still say they can't fix this easily, then they've not designed their code very well, and and can use this as an exercise to do the job properly.