Help Framework

[Jeff Wisard]

Hey all,

I am working on a web application that needs to provide context sensitive help for the user. I was hoping to find an open source library or framework that can plug into a web application (built with Struts) that can ease the pain, but I haven't been able to find a thing. Can anyone make a suggestion?

We are primarily interested in something that can make internationalization easier and can be customized to display different documents (or not display them) based on the user's authorizations. Anything would help, though, because we don't want to have to roll our own if we can prevent it.

Thanks!

[Junilu Lacar]

On my last project, the context sensitive help (CSH) was written using RoboHelp. RoboHelp has a pretty decent API that makes it relatively easy to integrate into a web application. The web application used Tiles and that made it even easier to integrate RoboHelp CSH and configure the application hookups to it. For example, after initial setup of the integration hooks, all the developers needed to do was to add an attribute in each page definition in tiles-def.xml that had a CSH topic like so:

<definition name="addUser.page" extends="main.layout">
<put name="title" value="Add User"/>
<put name="body" value="/addUser.jsp"/>
<put name="helpTopic" value="add_user_help"/>
</definition>

<definition name="addGroup.page" extends="main.layout">
<put name="title" value="Add Group"/>
<put name="body" value="/addGroup.jsp"/>
<put name="helpTopic" value="add_group_help"/>
</definition>


The main.layout page used a default helpTopic value which would display the General Help screen.

[Jeff Wisard]

Thanks Junilu. Unfortunately, we don't have the budget for RoboHelp. I'm looking for something open source (or otherwise free as in beer). Any other suggestions?

[Junilu Lacar]

I haven't tried any of them but the first two results of this Google search seem promising.