MadCap Software Forums

Hei,
we are currently working on implementing context-senstive help. Our designers came now up with the idea that context-sensitive help shall jump to a certain section in a topic. And I struggle with this challenge as it seems that there is no out-of-the-box solution for this.

Example:
A long and quite complex dialog X. The dialog has several "sections" A, B and C.
Each section (A, B and C) shall now have an own help button.
In Online Help, these sections are all in ONE single topic, all as drop-down texts. This should not be changed for online-help.

The only way I found out how this could possibly be implemented, is to copy the sections as micro content and then create Help IDs for the micro content. But this means that I would have to maintain the content twice: In the standard topic AND as micro content.
Maybe, I could create bookmarks in addition to the help ID and the developer simply adds both to the code? But I don't know if this works.

Has anyone of you ever had a similar challenge and could share their solution with me?

Just thinking out loud...

Could the content for each section be a snippet? Then you place the snippet into the overall help topic, and also create separate individual topics for each section containing the same snippet. The GUI calls the individual help topics, the help lists the overall topic and the content is maintainable in a single location.

Rob

It's been a long time, but I feel like it used to be possible to map a context id to a bookmark within a topic? You can definitely assign multiple map ids to a single topic.

Yep, as Psider suggested, Flare already supports this - just add a bookmark to the heading, and in the alias editor you can select the bookmark in the topic.

Yes, you are right Dave Lee and Psider. Thanks for the tip. A little hidden this feature. And strangely enough I didn't find this in Flare's help.
Thank you very much!!!

Test, though. A few releases of Flare back (going back several years), one of my clients and I observed that the CSH calls to the bookmarked headings did not work. That failure persisted for several Flare releases. I don't recall if MadCap eventually fixed the bug. So, run some tests to make sure you get the results you seek.