Thoughts about generating help text
We have a project to implement context-sensitive help (see http://www.openvpms.org/project/context-sensitive-help ), however, this will implement the code but not the help text itself.
This note discusses how to best build this help text.
As part of my RxWorks to OpenVPMS conversion I need to build some documention, and context-sensitive help can be a major part of this. There are obviously a couple of ways to do this:
- do it myself using whatever tools I want
- build it somewhere on the OpenVPMS site so that the results are immediately available to all and so that others can contribute
Option 1 allows me to build a practice tailored system, but the non-practice specific stuff is unavailable to the OPV community.
Option 2 requires input/work from the OPV webmaster to set up the required structures. My guess is that the help part of the OPV website needs to be structured like the current documention area - where each topic gets its own folder/directory and not as a forum area so that the urls generated by the context-sensitive code in OPV can access the required help page.
I also have a feeling that the help area should be independent of the 'standard' part of the OPV site (just like the jira section is), and that it should have its own menu ssetup (that mimics the standard OPV screen navigation).
I would also like a structure that allows us to re-use previous pages where possible. That is, if we build the pages for version 1.7, then when 1.8 hits the streets, we want to be able to easily us the 95% of pages that will be be same - and we also want to keep the 1.7 version available.
Question: am I barking up the wrong tree and should go with option 1, or is there some sense to option 2.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Thoughts about generating help text
When you create a book page in Drupal, you can specify the URL of the page. It should be possible to set up a book for context sensitive help in Drupal, for each OpenVPMS release.
Drupal supports copying books via the Book Copy module which I don't think is installed at present; this could be used to copy one context-sensitive help version to another.
Note that we used to host the OpenVPMS documentation in Confluence, but this didn't integrate with the OpenVPMS website.
-Tim A
Re: Thoughts about generating help text
Tim A - "When you create a book page in Drupal, you can specify the URL of the page." - how?
The Users|User Documentation, Implementors|Implementation Documenation, and Developers|Developer Documentation sections all use the same 'name space' - ie if you create a page with subject 'xxx' then the url for the page is http://openvpms.org/documenation/xxx and a sub-page is only that because of the menu system - ie the sub-topic 'xxxsub' has the url http://openvpms.org/documentation/xxxsub.
It may be possible in Drupal to create the url tree structure required - ie to create a page with the url http://openvpms.org/xxxx...xxxx/customer/documents/new - but with my access I can't see how.
In the Implementors|Implementation Documentation section, you will see an "OpenVPMS 1.6 Help Pages" that I created when playing - can you please purge it. Thanks.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Thoughts about generating help text
You should see a "URL path settings" area, like the screenshot below.
To specify a different URL, untick the "Automatic alias" box, and enter the new URL.
-Tim A
Re: Thoughts about generating help text
Tim A - I must be a junior peon whereas you must be a senior geek - you have far more options that I do. All I get is shown below. How do I get promotion? Regards, Tim