The Controversial Part...
(...or the inspiration for this session)

• Lack of communication/ integration of development team with the electronic documentation team.
• A need for Help Authors to know enough about how the Context Sensitive Help system works, so they are not at the mercy of reluctant developers.
• A need for Developers to know enough about how the Context Sensitive Help system works, so that they can realize the demands of the tech writers are not unreasonable.

• Overview of "The Way Windows Works"
• What every help author should know about how Context Sensitive Help works
• Implementing Context Sensitive Help from the Help Author's perspective
• Implementing Context Sensitive Help from the programmer's perspective

• events
• messages
• messages
• events
• events
• messages
• … you get the idea

• Event! - Click a button.
• Message! - A button was clicked. (WM_LBUTTONDOWN)
• Event! - Select a menu item.
• Message! - A menu item was selected. (WM_COMMAND)
• Event! - Minimize a window.
• Message! - A window was minimized. (WM_SIZE)

• Five common Context Sensitive Help events.
• The five events and their corresponding messages.

• Help button click.
• F1 key press.
• "What’s this" (?) button click.
• Right mouse click Context Menu.
• Shift+F1

• Help button click = WM_COMMAND
• F1 key press = WM_HELP
• "What’s this" (?) button click = WM_HELP
• Right mouse click Context Menu = WM_CONTEXTMENU
• Shift+F1 = WM_HELP

• WM_COMMAND
• WM_HELP
• WM_CONTEXTMENU

• WinHelp issues
• HTML Help issues
• Include file tips
• Food for thought...

• topic ids (#) = Help Context ids in programmer’s include file (.h)
• [MAP] section entries vs. an include file.
• Help Compiler Workshop features and tips for error checking.

• HASSLE! - topics are individual .htm files - but - name your .htm files according to the programmer’s include (.h) file
• BUG! - the HTML Help compiler only accepts include files that end with an .h extension
• HTML Help only supports plain-text context sensitive help popups at this time
• HTML Help also supports a unique Resource DLL approach to text popups which allows you to store the popup text as string resources - may aid performance

• Plan early on for a mnemonic approach to control and Help ID naming; e.g. IDH_OPTIONSDLG_FORMATBTN (cf. Nancy Hickman)
• DBHE.EXE - helps automate creation of a list of items to document as well as an include file for you and the developer to use
• Delphi and VB developers could save their forms as text and then extract the relevant information for an include file.

• The program doesn’t have to wait for the WM_XXX messages - you could design your own conditions and events and send the WM_ messages yourselves...

• The Help button
• The F1 key
• The "What’s This" (?) button
• The right-click context menu
• The Shift+F1key

• Handle the WM_COMMAND message and issue a simple WinHelp() or HTMLHelp () API call.

• ISSUE: The What’s This button is only supported by Windows in dialog boxes where there’s no minimize or maximize buttons.
• Enable the DS_CONTEXTHELP dialog style for the dialog.
• Handle the WM_HELP message as described for the F1 key.

• Handle the WM_CONTEXTMENU message.
• Create a DWORD array as described earlier, cast the wParam value of the WM_CONTEXTMENU to an HWND and issue a call to either the WinHelp() or HtmlHelp() Windows API functions:

• Handle the WM_HELP message as described for the F1 key.
• Depending on the development environment you may need to create a handler for the WM_KEYDOWN message that would handle Shift+F1 and then pass processing of messages to a message hook function until either the Escape key is pressed or a WM_HELP message is received. Process the WM_HELP message and then release the message hook.