RH 2015 - Building Dynamic URLs in Responsive HTML5 topics that capture customer info when clicked?

[KFarrelly]

I have a long description here describing my scenario, followed by my question. This relates to types of hyperlinks that can or can't be built in a help topic or table of content within the RoboHelp interface.

First some info about our product and help buttons in it. Our product is web based product. I have setup a Responsive HTML 5 help output that provides help content for our product and it resides on our company web server. URL's in the product for various help buttons are constructed behind the scenes from a string of variables including the version number of product, customer ID associated with the product, and a unique RDI associated with a help topic. The RDI is associated with a help topic's URL. Our developers set up the product code that constructs the URL's and I set up the RDI and RDI link for each help topic that has a help button in the product. A redirect database is used by me for my part of the URL and help configuration. For example, I setup an rdi value of ourhelpsystem67p400 with for topic A and the rdi link/URL associated with the topic A's rdi value, which points to the topic's html file within the html folder of our help output on the web server. I give the ourhelpsystem67p400 value to our developers for the help button that is supposed to call up the associated help topic when a user clicks that help button. The URL constructed by the product pulls version and customer ID from that customer's instance of the product and the ourhelpsystem67p400 value. This setup helps us understand who uses which topics.

We also have help videos and pdf's for which rdi and rdi links exist -- used when calling up help videos or pdf's that are linked to our product or linked to topics in help. In help itself, some links to our videos exist in our table of contents and help topics. I have been asked if it's possible for our those links in help to be set up to act like the video and help links in the product (so the links in help topics or table of contents would capture the product ID of the customer who accessed the content link in that help topic and pass that info along to our redirection / tracking setup). I believe that would require some behind the scenes coding to make a hyperlink in my help topic or table of contents to be variable and to capture/pass along info about who used the link in the help topic/contents. I do not see a way in the RoboHelp interface for hyperlink setup to create such a scenario. I only see options to link to files, multimedia, baggage files, etc. I use that interface today to type in the exact URL and include the called up content's associated rdi. For example, https://mycompanywebserver.com/?v=ourhelpvideo67pvideo1 would be a hyperlink to a video that I assigned an rdi of ourhelpvideo67video1 in our company's redirect database.

Does anyone know of a way to create a dynamic or variable hyperlink in Robohelp that captures some info about where the link was called up from?

For example, a way to manually edit files that store the hyperlink info in the generated set of files and folders that comprise help (adjust some code in files post-output)?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Short answer is - I don't think so

Longer answer is - I'm not 100% sure how you're calling CSH topics from within the app that would let me track all the various customer ID codes that ended up calling up topic "How Do I Do X?" in the help - it doesn't sound like you've got a bunch of variant "How Do Do X?" topics, so you must be handling that part ok. If the client has already opened up the full help and then navigates to another "How Do I Do Y?" topic, short of using something like Google Analytics or RH Server, how would you know anything about who they are or where they come from?

[KFarrelly]

Thanks for the thoughts about Google Analytics or RH Server.