Getting HTML5 side nav to open without browser controls

[bwofficer]

How do I make it so that the HTML5 side nav help site opens in a minimal-functionality browser window i.e. a window without the usual URL entry bar, forward and back buttons, favourites, and all the toolbar stuff that normally comes at the top of a browser window?

My aims are to to make it so that the browser doesn't look like a browser, and to make it impossible for the user to navigate away from the help site.

I've tried searching MadCap help and Googling more generally, to no avail, probably because I don't know the proper name for what I'm trying to do!

[NorthEast]

A lot depends on how your users will open your help site.
If it's opened from an app, then you need to write code in your app that controls how the help site is opened and displayed.
But if the user goes directly to your help site in their browser, then you have no real control over their browser window.

For example, if the help is for a Windows app, then your app can display your help site inside an embedded browser control in a Windows form.
So your Windows app will actually display the help site, rather than opening the help site in an actual browser.
That means your developers can specify what functionality is available in that browser control - e.g. disable the right-click menu, hide the address URL.

[bwofficer]

Thanks! That helped a lot.

A lot depends on how your users will open your help site.

If it's opened from an app, then you need to write code in your app that controls how the help site is opened and displayed. For example, if the help is for a Windows app, then your app can display your help site inside an embedded browser control in a Windows form. So your Windows app will actually display the help site, rather than opening the help site in an actual browser. That means your developers can specify what functionality is available in that browser control - e.g. disable the right-click menu, hide the address URL.

The user accesses help from the same Windows program that controls the machine (we're talking computer-controlled industrial machinery here).

Until now, all the machine control app does with regards to help is open a window listing the help PDFs on the machine. The user clicks on whichever they want and it opens in Adobe Reader. All I've done so far is to get the developer to add the .htm file extension to the list of file types presented. Having done so, it opens in a browser. I suspect that the program simply leaves it up to Windows to decide which app to open the file in.

Your idea of a browser control within the actual app seems a good one. I didn't know such a thing was possible, so I didn't know to ask for it.

But if the user goes directly to your help site in their browser, then you have no real control over their browser window.

This is what I think is happening, albeit via the file list presented by the app rather than directly. Sounds like I need to change that.

Thanks again!

[NorthEast]

That should be fairly easy. Just ask your developer to open the help in a Windows form that contains a WebBrowser Control.
You can set properties for the WebBrowser Control to choose what functionality is/isn't available.

The embedded browser control will use the Edge browser engine that's built-in to Windows (which is the same engine as Chrome these days).

[jimgilliam]

This is valuable information. @NorthEast and @bwofficer, would the Windows form option work within the PowerBI application that Microsoft owns? Right now, we're using the HTML Viewer "widget" that's available on PowerBi's store, but it doesn't allow JavaScript.

If I created the Windows form and included our help output in it, would it be easy for developers to put into our PowerBI application?

Jim

[NorthEast]

No idea Jim, my experience was with a Windows app.