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Jared Hess
Jared Hess
Legend
July 12, 2016
Question

Has anyone used Tools | CSH | Open CSH Help successfully?

  • July 12, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1485 views

I'm talking about this

With this tool you can apparently have RH run your application and enjoy a more dynamic context mapping experience by accessing a dialog box directly in the app, pressing F1 and then mapping it within RH.

This is something we'd LOVE to use, but frustratingly so, for multiple versions, it never works.

We have:

RH 2015, latest patch

Windows 64-bit Computer

Our product we support is a C++ app

The topic "Dynamic editing of context-senstive topics" in RH's own help file is where this is discussed.

Under "Usage Scenarios", it says:

"Dynamic context-sensitive mapping of dialog boxes and topics eliminates the need for technical authors to manually keep track of map IDs. Instead, technical authors can open the application and associate the relevant Help topic dynamically with a dialog box."

The topic, "Map an application dialog box with a topic" explains how to do this:

1) Open the Help project for the application in RoboHelp.

2) Click Tools > CSH > Open CSH Help.

3) Browse and select the executable file (.exe) for the application. Click Open.

4) Once the application has launched, browse to an application dialog box with context-sensitive Help mapping. Press F1 or click the Help button.

Once the application has launched, browse to an application dialog box with context-sensitive Help mapping. Press F1 or click the Help button.

5) In the CSH Options dialog box in RoboHelp, select a map file from the Project Map File pop-up menu.

NOTE:    The CSH Options dialog box appears only if you launched the application from within RoboHelp using Tools > CSH > Open CSH Help.

But for me it never works. I can get it to run the application, but nothing opens up in RoboHelp when I press F1, even though F1 clearly works and navigates to topics appropriately in our help.

The help doesn't give a lot of info on what to do to get this setup and working properly. Ideas?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

johndaigle
johndaigle
Legend
July 13, 2016

Hi, Jared

By chance did you have the developers re-compile the C++ application with the RoboHelp API before testing it within RoboHelp?

Here is a relevant section of the help discussing this:

Program Help for Visual C++ applications

This information is for developers connecting context-sensitive Help topics to C++ applications.

1) Open the project in the C++ IDE.

2) Add RoboHelp_CSH.cpp and RoboHelp_CSH.h to the project.

3) Link the wininet.lib and hhctrl.lib libraries to the application. Look for the hhctrl.lib library in

the CSH API subfolder of the installation folder.

4) If you are using Microsoft Visual C++ with MFC, set the RoboHelp_CSH.cpp file so that it

doesn’t use precompiled headers.

Let us know if this helps.
John

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

Evergreen, Colorado

www.showmethedemo.com

John DaigleAdobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate InstructorNewport, Oregon
Jared Hess
Jared HessAuthor
Legend
July 13, 2016

Hi John. Thanks for the response.

No, we haven't. I guess I was just hoping it would work out of the box.

I remember that we did try to get this working back in RH 9 a couple of years back, and our devs couldn't figure it out; either that, or it simply didn't work back then (one of my colleagues was working with them so I was getting the info second hand).

I'm still curious though if anyone been able to get this to work with a C++ app in RH 2015, even after following the instructions you provided?

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