On-line help

[Eric Chatonet]

Hi Rob,

The easiest way in your case I suppose (in fact there many ways :-)  
could be to have a field displaying the right info according to the  
mouse location.
It's easy to make:

You put 2 generic handlers in your stack (or card) script as the  
following:

on mouseEnter
   put the uTextHelp of the target into fld "UserInfo"
on mouseEnter
-----
on mouseLeave
   put empty into fld "UserInfo"
end mouseLeave

For each object you want to display help you create a uTextHelp  
custom property in it with the right text.
If the property does not exist the mouseEnter handler will put empty  
into your help field.
Otherwise your help will be displayed.
That's all.

Of course, you can make things more sophisticated by using html text  
(and by the fact avoid cross-platforms text encoding issues),  
override your generic handlers in the objects scripts when needed and  
using some conditional structures in order to provide contextual  
help, etc.
But that's another story :-)

BTW, you could be interested too by my tutorial about *contextual*  
tooltips.
Just get Tutorials Picker from Rev Online (user: So Smart Software)  
to access it.

Best Regards from Paris,

Eric Chatonet.

Le 16 juil. 05 à 10:41, Rob Beynon a écrit :

> Dear All,
>
> My software grows organically, as I add new features. Although modest,
> I reach the pint where simple 'tool tips' are no longer enough help.
> Rather than write a manual (yuch!) I'd prefer to include some on line
> help. I wonder how you all do this..
>
> Is there a tool that allows me to set up a LH tree and a RH contents
> format?
>
> Should I use a new substack just for help, or hidden fields
>
> Could I use a help mode, where 'mouseOvers' bring up more detailed
> field information (seems messy).
>
> I'd be grateful for insight and thoughts about how you address this
> problem.


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