Displaying Context-Sensitive Help

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Context-sensitive help, for the purpose of this discussion, refers to help support for the controls in a dialog box that users access with:

Context-sensitive help also refers to accessing the help viewer via a command button or menu option.

To implement help for a dialog-box control, you must first create a text file that you include in your HTML Help project and then create a two-dimensional array. Then, you can implement code that supports F1, right-click, or question-mark-pointer access to text in the help file.

The source information for context-sensitive help is stored in a .txt file that you include in your HTML Help project.

To create the context-sensitive help text file

  1. Use a text editor to create a .txt file.

  2. Format the topics as follows:
    .topic 1
    help text for control 1
    .topic 2
    help text for control 2

Note   For more information, see "Designing context-sensitive help" in HTML Help's online help. From the Help menu (in HTML Help Workshop), choose Help Topics.

To support help for resources in a dialog box, you must create a two-dimensional array that maps control IDs to help IDs (topic numbers).

To create the two-dimensional array

Each entry in the two-dimensional array pairs a resource ID for a dialog-box control with a topic number from the context-sensitive help text file. If you do not want a specific resource to have What's This? Help, use –1. The last pair in this array should be 0,0.

What's This? Help displays the control's help when a user right-clicks the control.

To implement right-click What's This? Help

F1 access to context-sensitive help means that users will be able to press F1 when a control has focus to access help.

To implement F1 access to context-sensitive help

If you already implement F1 access to context-sensitive help, you can easily enable the What's This? pointer, which causes a question mark to appear on the title bar, in the upper right-hand corner of the dialog box.

To enable the What's This? Help question-mark pointer

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