HOWTO: Add Context-Sensitive Help to Your ActiveX Control

• Microsoft Visual Basic Professional and Enterprise Editions for Windows, versions 5.0, 6.0

SUMMARY

This article shows you how to add context-sensitive Help to an ActiveX Control that you create in Visual Basic. By adding this feature to your control, you allow the user to quickly access the appropriate Help topics for your control. This article addresses the use of the ActiveX control on a Visual Basic form. If you use the control in Internet Explorer, you get different behavior.

MORE INFORMATION

You can set a Help topic for your ActiveX control or any of its constituent controls. The first step is to identify a Help file for the ActiveX control, after which you can set a topic for the control and for each constituent control.

To Identify a Help File for an ActiveX Control

1. Click Project Properties on the Project menu for your ActiveX control project. The Project Properties dialog box appears.



2. On the General tab, type the file name of your Help file in the Help File Name box. This Help file should contain all the topics pertaining to your control.



3. In the Project Help Context ID box of the General tab, type the Context ID number of the topic you want to display for the ActiveX control.



4. Click OK to close the Project Properties dialog box.
   
   You have just set a Help file topic for your ActiveX control. This topic will appear after you perform one of the following actions:
   
   
   • In the Object Browser, right-click your ActiveX control class to display the pop-up menu. In the pop-up menu, click Help.
   
   
   
   • Place the control on a form in a Standard EXE project and select the control and then press the F1 key.
   
   
   
   • When you run your project with the control, set the focus to the control and press the F1 key.
   
   
   
   You can also assign a Help topic to each constituent control in the ActiveX control by setting the HelpContextID property of each constituent control. However, this topic will appear only if you set the WhatsThisButton and WhatsThisHelp properties of the form with the control to True. The topic is displayed only when the user clicks the WhatsThisButton and drags the question mark to the constituent control.
   
   If the constituent control has the focus and the user presses the F1 key, the topic set for the ActiveX control is displayed, rather than the topic assigned to the constituent control.

REFERENCES

Visual Basic Books Online: Help; Help Files

Additional query words: kbVBp500 kbActiveX kbIE kbVBp kbDSupport kbdsd kbAutomation kbVBp600 KBCTRLCREATE KBCONTROL

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