MadCap Software Forums

Hello!

The Developer on the project I've been tasked w/ would like to incorporate field-by-field help using his own "tool." Ahh!!!
PLEASE tell me Flare has the ability to produce F1 Help that I can have the Developer integrate w/ the product we are developing. Does FLARE's context sensitive Help include F1 Level/Field help?? I'm meeting w/ the Developer today and want to be able to tell him that MY TOOL (flare) has the ability to produce what he wants.

Thanks!

You can simulate the effect, but Flare doesn't have that option directly. If you want the help to appear in your software and not open the entire help, then you could create a second skin in Flare that specified the width and height of the field-level help window. Your developer would then make a CSH call to the appropriate topic and would include the skin name in the call. Your developer would probably want to use code to position the window instead of your skin specifying the x/y coordinates in the monitor.

Also, field-level help is basically no different than any other CSH. You specify aliases and IDs and use that to call the desired content. You do not have to make a topic for each control, you can tie aliases and IDs to bookmarks on a page. When calling that ID the topic displays and automatically scrolls to the position of the bookmark.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure if either solution will serve as a strong selling point but we'll see how the meeting goes. I appreciate the information as I did not find anything about field-to-field help in the Flare Help pages and I wasn't aware of what "work arounds" existed. Much thanks again.

p.s. How do you tie an alias and ID to bookmarks on a page? Would I have to hard code something?

In your project organizer you would create an alias file and then link your topics to this, it would create your header file for you also.

You can tie an alias/ID to a bookmark by selecting to shop bookmarks in the alias editor. You can then select a bookmark as easy as you can select a topic.

Huh. Ok, thanks! I'll have to play around w/ it a bit and see what I come up with. Thanks for sharing your Flare smarts.