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A
Anyhoo
Known Participant
July 27, 2017
Question

Context Sensitive Help Failure in RoboHelp 11

  • July 27, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1487 views

In my application, I am trying to form URLs to automatically pull up context sensitive help based upon Robohelp Topic Ids.  I have read about how it should work using this reference: https://www.wvanweelden.eu/articles/part/csh-start-file  but for some reason it is not working at all.  Let me describe the issue in more detail.  I have a Robohelp project wit many topic ids.  I generate webhelp for the project and publish it.  I then create a url that I want to display the web page corresponding to the Robohelp topic ID.  For example:  "http://MyWebSite/Documentation/DEVELOPMENT/WebHelp/index_csh.htm#TopicID=Batch_Folder,withnavpane=true".  According to the documentation I have read, this should work but no matter what topic id I use, the Help Start page is always displayed.  I am at a loss to explain why this is failing when I appear to have followed all the proper steps to make it function properly.  Can someone in this community please help me?

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1 reply

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 28, 2017

Calling help using URLs and Topic IDs are different methods. Topic IDs are contained in a file you hand to developers and they do whatever is needed according to what tool they use for development.

Take a look at my site where there is another topic about using URLs. Maybe that will help.

Calling WebHelp Topics

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

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A
AnyhooAuthor
Known Participant
July 28, 2017

Peter:

I am a developer who is using Robohelp to create context sensitive links in an application.  A user clicks on a link which points to a Url that opens a page associated with that specific Robohelp Topic Id.  I don't understand you saying calling help using URLs and Topic IDs are different methods.  The Topic Id is included in the Url for the context-sensitive link. The Topic Id I am calling exists in the BSSCDefault.h file and is valid. I had already seen the page you linked in your response.  In fact, on the page Using Topic IDs it describes the very same procedure I am trying to use but that is not working for me.

A
AnyhooAuthor
Known Participant
July 31, 2017

How are the map files created? Are you generating the .h files outside of RoboHelp? In that case, you'll need to assign the id's to topics. Otherwise you'll just have a lot of id's but they're unmapped.

If you're a developer, you can generate the .ALI file to map automatically. (Don't forget to delete the CPD before opening the project and generating the output.)


Willam, we programmatically create both the BSSCDefault.h mapping file and the .ali alias file outside of Robohelp. I discussed this with another developer and was told that at one time this used to work for us, but it is currently not working and I am trying to discover why that is.

We have not being doing anything with the .CPD file.  What is the significance of this file and when/how does it get generated?  Would it be appropriate to programmatically delete the .CPD file at the same time the mapping and alias file get created?

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