[archive] Help automation

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

Could you please provide some source illustrating what you do today?

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

We use the procedure which described in ACUCOBOL-GT User Interface Programming ? Chapter 10: Help Automation.
We made a help processor Cobol program which named "ithelp", defined in configuration variable HELP_PROGRAM.
In our programs we define the HelpID for every screen. We also made a ".h" file (helpids.h) which contains the context IDs and in our help project file we added the statement "#include helpids.h" in MAP section.
The help works for every program, but we want to call the table of contents from the main menu. I tried to use the "$winhelp" routine, but I get the message "The topic does not exist?"
The zip file contains a demo project and the \\hlpdemo\\Project1\\Object directory the required files.

Thank you.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

To get the "Table of Content" use:

CALL "$WINHELP" USING "help.hlp" HELP-CONTENTS

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

To get the "Table of Content" use:

CALL "$WINHELP" USING "help.hlp" HELP-CONTENTS

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

To get the "Table of Content" use:

CALL "$WINHELP" USING "help.hlp" HELP-CONTENTS

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

Ok, I corrected it, but still don?t work. It appears the first topic and not the table of contents.
In addition, I?d like to ask if it?s necessary to use the HELP-QUIT operation when the application?s menu or a program closes. Note that we use only one help file in our application, with one topic for each program.

[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 26 March 2004]

We use the help automation mechanism in our application to provide help information. Can we call the table of contents of the help file instead of a particular topic?

To take the last first; Yes, you must explicitely close the help with HELP-QUIT.
I suspect you want to show the search dialog, but the Windows help system doesn't consider that the HELP-CONTENTS, what you get are in fact the HELP-CONTENTS, just try it with another help file, try for instance the acudebug.hlp