Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: ANN: Context Sensitive Help System

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I really like how this works. Ideally it should incorporate the help texts of ad_form.

As for the display, I do agree with Peter but for the moment having 1 and 2 as an option should be sufficient. Obviously though, if you go with 2, you should refresh the help window whenever you go to a new page.

As for bringing those together again. Well, as you are storing the help as an I18N message anyway, the same process should apply, whatever it might turn out to be.

Package wide help support: This is what /doc is there for. So package wide documentation should be handled either using the Wiki and then exported to /doc or by just adding documentation to /doc. If you really want this to be handled the same way just create an index.adp in /www/doc with # my-package.package_wide_help#.

As your package is non intrusive, the community does not have to come up with a "yes" or "no" with regards to liking your package. Those who like your approach can just make use of it. It only becomes an issue when we commit message keys back to the translation server, but a quick change in acs-lang with a parameter "UseHelpKeysP" set to "0", that surpresses import/export of help message keys, should take care of that problem. And if you want to be really non intrusive, don't make this a parameter but write a callback for the import/export functions in acs-lang that would do the same (though this is a little bit more tricky, I have to admit).