Customer wants to add bespoke content to HTML5 Help system

[HelenF]

Hi, I'm fairly sure I've asked this question before so apologies for asking again but here goes...

Let's imagine I have a product called BIGPRODUCT and it has an extensive HTML5 Help system written in Flare 2017. The BIGPRODUCT Help is published to a Webserver.

Now let's imagine that a customer wants to write their own Help for BIGPRODUCT. The customer is prepared to buy Flare, but won't be given access to the BIGPRODUCT Help source files.

Can anyone suggest how we might get the BIGPRODUCT Help and the customer's bespoke Help to integrate?

We can't merge the bespoke Help into the BIGPRODUCT Help because we won't want bespoke content on our Webserver.

If I add a hyperlink in the BIGPRODUCT Help to the customer's Help it will be visible to other customers.

So my current thinking is that the only thing we can do is have the customer create a hyperlink from his customized Help to the BIGPRODUCT Help.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks very much
Helen

[devjoe]

They will need a separate installation of the help output and a method of customizing the product to use this version of the help.

• If you have a static set of extra content from them, you could create another copy of the help on your server at another URL which includes this customer's extra content.
• If the customer wants to be able to customize it as they go along, or they don't want to send you their content, you could deliver for them a set of help output files they can install on their own server, configured to allow runtime merging. Note that this only works for tripane HTML5 output (but if you have an extensive HTML5 help system, it really shouldn't be top nav anyway and you would already have been complaining about the dozen ways top nav falls apart for large help systems). Then they can drop their custom project output in the automerge folder on the server.
• You could include a preference somewhere which is by default set to the base URL for your help system, and which the product uses in calling help. This customer can then set it to point to one of the other scenarios suggested above.

[trent the thief]

Devjoe, have you ever implemented that on a CentOS linux box running ASP.NET core?

[devjoe]

Trent, I have not done that, but ask around. There's probably somebody around here who tried installing Flare help on Linux who might have experience with that.

[HelenF]

Thanks for the suggestions DevJoe