Re: Two cool tricks for Web-based Help

Subject: Re: Two cool tricks for Web-based Help
From: "Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "Rowena Hart" <RHart -at- acdsystems -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 11:07:53 +0530

On 11/17/06, Rowena Hart <RHart -at- acdsystems -dot- com> wrote:


Everything worked fine until developers started creating dynamic pages
for buy/sell transactions. In other words, the content of the pages
changed completely depending on the type of transaction that the
customer selected from a drop-down list. Our only solution, at the time
anyway, was to hard-code links to the appropriate help file.

If anyone has a work-around for dynamic ASP pages please share it!


This isn't a work-around since I've never implemented this kind of help :-)
but:
A given ASP file (let's call it dynapage.asp) HAS to use querystring
(parameters tacked on at end of URL) or form fields to maintain state (what
particular variation of the page has been generated/is being viewed),
unless:
a) The server's using a session to keep track of who's doing what at a given
point in time, or
b) Your app uses an AJAX-ified interface, making several partial requests to
the server and updating the page in the browser as a result of the call,
without reloading the page itself.

The old, and simpler, type of ASP coding basically just had a switch
structure, which would branch to output a different form of the page, based
on a main switch variable; that variable would be set from a form field or
querystring parameter submitted by the browser. In such a case, if (as is
very likely), the page has a limited number of possible values for this main
switch variable, you could:
a) create dynafile-varvalue1-h.htm as the help page for dynafile.asp, when
the main switch variable's value was "varvalue1" (I'm including the -h after
reading the excellent information Geoff Hart (and John Garison) have
posted.) Create other help pages with differing values of the main switch
variable.
b) In dynafile.asp's code, have developers code the HREF for the help file
as <name of this asp file>-<main switch variable value>-h.htm

I know there's a lot of potential problems since I don't know anything about
your app or help system, but maybe, just *maybe* this is a workable idea :-)
HTH
Ed.
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References:
RE: Two cool tricks for Web-based Help: From: Rowena Hart

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