Hi,
Where can I find a list of all the standard symbols (e.g. %%year%%) that are available in Help Studio. For instance I want to reference the current topic name within the page footer.
Cheers, Peter
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16 comments
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PeterJ bump... -
PeterJ Bump......
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Mike Shaw (Innovasys) You can use these to achieve a refernece of the Topic Name / Title in the Footer - %%itemname%% and %%itemtitle%%.
I hope this helps. -
PeterJ Hi Mike,
Yes, that does help. For future reference can you let me have a full list of the symbols that are available.
Cheers, Peter
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Mike Shaw (Innovasys) Hello Peter,
I'm afraid we don't actually have a list of symbols or variables we can supply, if you do need to achieve any thing else please let us know and we will try to point you in the right direction.
I'm sorry I couldn't be of more assistance, -
PeterJ Hi Mike,
Well I guess the point is without such a list it may not occur to the programmer that a useful symbol may exist. Do you regard your symbol list as confidential information and therefore not publishable? If so, I can understand that - I may not like it - but I can understand it.
Cheers, Peter
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PeterJ Hi Mike,
%%itemname%% worked fine thanks.
A related but not a Help Studio specific question. How do I (or can I?) access the contents of Windows environment variable? I want to use it in the page footer. This is probably HTML 101 so appologies for the question but I've been going round in Google circles for most of the afternoon to try and find out how to do this and I just wonder if I've been wasted my time and, in actual fact, it can't be done. Hopefully it can and I'm just not stringing the correct syntax together.
Cheers, Peter
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Mike Shaw (Innovasys) Can you confirm your exact need here please, are you trying to run commands from the Footer?
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PeterJ Hi Mike,
Thanks for the reply. In Project > Project Settings > Project Properties > Page Footer (non scrolling) I have the following which works fine:
© Copyright 2001-%%year%% Systems Engineering Pty. Ltd. For User Interface Notes: <a style=
"auto-update-caption: true" href="Data_Grids.html">click here</a> For Company Specific Usage Notes: <a style=
"auto-update-caption: true" href=%%CompanyHelp%%>click here</a>The intent is to give the user easy access to common UI help pages (via Data_Grids.html) and access to any client specific help that our customers may want to develop, e.g. specific work instructions, via %%CompanyHelp%%.
In Custom Properties I have a property called CompanyHelp that, at the moment, contains:
file:///C:/HelpDirectory/%%itemname%%.html
I want to replace "C:/HelpDirectory/" with a Windows environment variable that returns the path to the help files.
Cheers, Peter
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Richard Sloggett We're not aware of any way to use environment variables in Html I'm afraid. How are you deploying your help? If you are deploying as plain Html you could deploy your help files under a common root and use relative links.
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PeterJ Hi Richard,
Would you mind helping me out with this with two examples please. What href=??? syntax is needed for linking to html files in the same directory as the chm file and what syntax would I use to link to files in a child directory to my chm directory.
I've tried lots of variations and none work. I'm not even sure if I should be using the http or file protocols. I've had a look at the property of the links I'm creating and some actually 'looked' kosha but didn't work. Sometimes the link didn't work at all sometimes it gave a File not Found error. In researching the issue I've even found references that say the file protocol is no longer supported by IE. Sometimes the address that gets generated in the help file has ms-its: as the protocol??
Anyway, I'm stuck - please help.
Cheers, Peter
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PeterJ Bump...
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Richard Sloggett We're not aware of any way to do this - and even if you could you would probably hit an IE security wall by navigating to a file in the local machine zone from a CHM page. The ms-its: protocol is the protocol for pages in your CHM.
Why is it that you can't include the "loose files" in the .CHM?
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PeterJ Hi Richard,
What we want to do is give our users the topic name for each section of the help, e.g frmABC, frmDEW etc and say: if you create an html file called TopicName.html and click the Company Help link at the foot of the page in the on-line help your own html file will display - this could be specific work instructions to do with the usage of our system at their site.
So, in answer to your question we have no control over the creation and maintenance of these files and they would be different for each customer therefore including them in our CHM is not possible.
We don't want to hard code the location of the user html files. We want their location to be somewhere relative to the chm file which is in the install path selected by the user. They could be the same directory as the chm file if need be but we would prefer a separate directory dedicated to the user html files.
Cheers, Peter
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PeterJ Bump..
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Mike Shaw (Innovasys) Hello,
You can acheive this by linking to another .chm named in a standard way, for example ComanyHelp.chm, with a root Topic of default.html. You could then include that in the same directory as the main .chm and the link will always work. Each company could then deliver a different version of that .chm. You could also use Runtime Merge to include the TOC from that file with your own.
I hope this helps.
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