Re: WinHelp context sensitivity problem: Help needed

Subject: Re: WinHelp context sensitivity problem: Help needed
From: "Gowin, Stephanie" <Stephanie -dot- Gowin -at- PBDIR -dot- COM>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 11:12:25 -0800

On February 10th, Brett P. writes:

> The problem is that a Winhelp 3.1 file, which has context sensitivity
> within the application, won't display three of the topics, instead
> producing a message like "Help topic does not exist." There are
> numerous other topics within this help file that work just fine, BTW.
>
> The map numbers for the topics in the HPJ file match the topic the
> programmer has specified for the program to call, but for some reason
> it doesn't work for these three topics. If the programmer provides a
> different map number, the topic associated with that map number
> displays fine.

Use the Winhelp BugHunter in Blue Sky's WinHelp toolkit to find out the
*real* context-mapping numbers of the windows. This tool is an excellent
way to find out if the fault is with your .hpj file or with the
programming.

The online help project for which I'm writing and managing had the same
problem of context-sensitive windows that didn't work despite having the
mapping numbers from the programmers correctly matched to our .hpj file.
In our case, however, the discrepancy was much more dramatic; 40% of our
supposedly context-sensitive windows did not call up the correct
procedures.

After much research and hair-pulling, what we discovered was that the
programmers, in trying to build redundancy into their application, had,
to put it bluntly, screwed up the possibility of reliable context
sensitivity for certain windows. If you use the bug hunt tool, you can
see if your programmers did something similar -- call up the affected
windows several times. If the context numbers don't match their .h file,
or if they change at all, you might want to talk to the programmers.

I've given an abbreviated and rushed description of the problem. If you
need more assistance, feel free to contact me directly at
stephanie -dot- gowin -at- pbdir -dot- com -dot-

Good luck,
Stephanie


>

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