[thelist] ColdFusion Context Sensitive Help

Joshua Olson joshua at waetech.com
Tue Mar 2 10:18:30 CST 2004


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kyle Murphy
> Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2004 10:58 AM
>
> I have an existing application that is written in CF, and I need to add
> context sensitive help to it.  Does anyone have any suggestions for an
> application that would be useful for this?
>
> My thinking is that I'm basically going to first build a table that
> lists all of my template names to link my help topics to, but that seems
> like a bad way to do it.  I'm not sure of any other way to map help to
> specific pages on my site.

Kyle,

On one site I built I used the script name as the key into the help system.
Example:

If the URL was http://www.domain.com/foo/bar/test.cfm?id=15

Then the key into the help system is a combination of the script path and
script name:

"/foo/bar/test.cfm"

The table that held the help information looked something like this:

href varchar(100) PRIMARY KEY
help_text text

Very simple, surprisingly robust for simple sites so long as the url's don't
change.  When you add new pages you don't need to add a record to the
database until you've written the manual for it, so maintenance is very
easy.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com/service_areas/
706.210.0168




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