Bespoke Help Files

February 17, 200520 yr

Hi,

I'm not really sure where this post lives, so I'll put it here.

I want to include my own help files and at the moment I use a number of html files and the Open URL command to link to various bookmarks in them.

However, I thought about using the .chm format (probably Microsoft only ?).

The problem with that is there appears to be no way to "Go To" a bookmark. Usually .chm files are called using a form similar to: <filename.chm>::<html file>#Bookmark.

But you cannot append things to the end of a name in the Send Event command.

Any ideas

Cheers,

Roger.

February 17, 200520 yr

Newbies

I believe one easy way to include the Help info is to add directly to your database, if you look at FileMaker's templates you'll see that most of them have the help information built-in as a list of some sort.

Just a thought!

Good Luck!

February 17, 200520 yr

Or you could design Help layouts and put the text directly on the layout.

February 18, 200520 yr

Author

Thanks - I do actually do that, but thought it would be nice to link to an external help file as well.

In the interim I did a little experimenting and thought I had come up with a workable solution, using a query string appended to the url in the "Open URL" command. However, it appears that the Open URL command discards the query string (I put a javascript alert in my test html file - and there it was, gone).

Can anyone please verify that a query string does (or doesn't) get discarded by the Open URL script step.

Cheers,

Roger.

February 18, 200520 yr

I put my Help (the manual is about 120 pages) into a PDF file. Every user has Acrobat Reader, which I install if it isn't on the user's disk as part of my installation setup. When a user wants Help, I bring up Reader with the manual. Although I don't use FM to bring it up, the Send Message step can do it. This way, they get a detailed index, and can print whatever they want.

Steve