One would hope that the company that owns Flash, Flex and RoboHelp is working on some integration. I have not seen anything myself yet.
Here is what I did: * I use an external browser window to display help * I chose to have two levels of context, "module", and "view". * My navigation system always knows the current context. * Invoking help in Flex uses ExternalInterface to call out to a javascript function in the wrapper * The wrapper creates or gets the reference to the help window, and builds the url based on module and view arguments. * The module defines the html page, and the "view" is an "#" anchor in the url to navigate to the appropriate part of the page. My needs were very simple, and this simple approach worked satisfactorily. The help authors needed only the module and view ids, which were descriptive strings. Tracy ________________________________ From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:flexcod...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of jim.abbott45 Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 12:27 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: [flexcoders] WANTED: Online help integration, authoring, best practices (for Flex or Ajax) Does anyone have any recommendations about good ways to add online help to Flex (and maybe Ajax) applications? In particular . . . 1) Is your help system integrated into the application or is it in a separate (browser) window? 2) How do you achieve _context-sensitive_ linkage? 3) What tooling (i.e., RoboHelp, HTML editor, etc.) did you use? 4) What did your authoring to deployment workflow look like (and how did you handle content changes)? ----- FYI: I already searched FlexCoders, but all I could find that seemed relevant was this post (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/129245 <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/129245> ) from October and this one (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/16032 <http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/16032> ) from, gulp, 2005! And neither one had any responses (sigh). ----- Specifically, some of my colleagues would like to do single-source generation of our help content and then publish the content in WebHelp/HTMLhelp form. However, we can't directly use that content in Flex (3), because the HtmlText property of the Flex text controls only supports a very limited subset of HTML. For example, our writer would like to use lists and tables, but the Flex controls don't support that. Any ideas people? Thanks in advance, Jim Abbott
