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tardoin
Participating Frequently
June 17, 2011
Question

Clicking Dock Icon Goes Home

  • June 17, 2011
  • 2 replies
  • 726 views

Hi,

We have an Air Help (Locally installed) application that we launch from our C++ application to show contextual help.

This Air Help application seems to have a bug in MacOS where, once it's launched and you're viewing a specific page, if you click its dock icon, it goes to the "home" page. I believe this is also causing a problem where, if we attempt to show contextual help when the help is already launched, it only goes to the home page.

I searched all over for any mention of this issue without luck. It seems there isn't a lot of discussion about using RoboHelp to package AIR help on MacOS. We also use this on Windows and it works fine.

The call on Mac to launch the help is using LSOpenApplication. I found that if I pass the "kLSLaunchNewInstance" flag, we at least get a new instance of our help application that takes the user to the requested page. However, it feels like a hackish way to fix the problem -- and even still if you click the dock icon, you lose your page and it goes to the "home" page.

Anyone else see or able to work around this behavior?

Is there a sample Robohelp+Air local application available somewhere that I could grab and confirm whether this bug is maybe something nonstandard that we're doing that we could correct, or if it's common to other airhelp applications?

I have to admit, I'm an engineer, not a help author, so I'm no expert in the process of generating this help application or even the roles of the tools we use. But from what I saw there weren't many options to mess with. It feels like we need to handle the "UserClickedDockIcon" or maybe "AppRelaunched" event, and make it not do "GoToHomePage()", or something. I made those up of course, but just to illustrate what it seems to be doing.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Tim Ardoin

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    T
    tardoinAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 23, 2011

    Thanks, Peter.

    I'm going to keep this "open" a little just to see if anyone else dares to chime in.

    Surely someone else must use Robohelp to generate AIR Help for use on MacOS.

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 18, 2011

    The forum sticky topics include Before You Post that asks that all threads start with the version of RoboHelp that you are using.

    If you have RoboHelp 9 you will find one at

    C:\Users\YourUserName\Documents\My RoboHelp Projects\Adobe RoboHelp 9\Samples\Salesbuilder\AIR_Application_and_CSH_Help

    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

    @petergrainge

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    T
    tardoinAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 20, 2011

    Thank you Peter.

    We are using RoboHelp 9.

    I've tried the "SalesBuilder" sample contained there and it does the same thing. So if you dig into the help a bit, then say, look something up on Google, then go back to the help via clicking the Dock, the help moves you back to the home page, losing your place. This doesn't happen on Windows.

    Honestly for us the big problem is that on Mac, programatically (via C++) trying to show contextual help only works the first time. The second time, you always get the home page, and I think that behavior is somehow related to the above. I'm going to try to show contextual help with the Salesbuilder sample to see if it does the same thing.

    T
    tardoinAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 20, 2011

    Ok, I was able to temporarly hook up our app to call the Salesbuilder help at a hard coded contextual area via a hard coded URL (we call using mapid).

    It does the same thing. The first call works, and every other call fails (taking you to the home page) unless you close the help app, and then it works the first time again. In other words, if the help app is already up, contextual help will fail and instead just take you to the home page.

    On Windows, it works fine.

    I find it hard to believe that such a flagrant issue exists in this system as a major selling point seems to be platform independence. Unless nobody uses this on Mac. I can't believe that is true. That makes me feel like maybe we're launching it wrong.

    We are using the "RoboHelp_CSH.cpp" file which I believe is supplied by Adobe. There is a call called "RH_AIR_ShowHelp()" where we pass in the URL or MapID string (or others which we don't use). That creates an argument array (CFArrayRef) and calls LaunchProcess (same file) , which creates a FSRef for the help executable, fills out an appParams (storing the CFArrayRef inside the "argv" member), and calls LSOpenApplication.

    Perhaps this code is out of date, but I believe this problem has always existed since we moved to AIR help. And we did file a bug with Adobe, but I am trying to see if there's anything we can do from this side to make it work.

    Thanks in advance for your time!

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