Building Application Help file systems

Support
#1

Hi Cuba team
Could you please shed some light on how can we build the help system files and contents for the application developed in CUBA?

Mortoza

1 Like
#2

Hi Mortoza,

What do you mean - a documentation for an application like CUBA manual, or context help embedded in the application UI?

#3

Hi Konstantin,
A Context help embedded in the application UI. This can be context sensitive and help systems with search options, links from one help context to another context through different texts contents etc.

#4

Hello Mortoza,

I can suggest two options:

  1. Use description attribute which defines a hint which is displayed in a popup when a user hovers mouse over the component.
  2. Extend the main window and add a right or a left panel with an embedded component which will show the content of HTML or PDF files.

Regards,

Gleb

#5

Thanks for those hints. which method have you used in CUBA STUDIO? Do you have any sample app that I can refer to for more details?

#6

Hi,

i created a help system that looks somewhat like the studio solution as a CUBA application: GitHub - mariodavid/cuba-example-help-system: CUBA platform example that allows to show help messages for particular screens

It is based on an entity that stores the help content. You can open the help system via “F1” in the main window.

It may be a starting point for you. Perhaps i will change it into a app component so that it can be used for other users.

Bye
Mario

#7

Thanks Mario, that will be great if you can make it a component. I shall try that out.

@Konstantin / @Gleb
May we know what is the framework you have used for the current version of documentation, it looks pretty nice and have scroll-able responsive menu for different devices.

#8

The platform documentation, starting with version 6.0, is written using the Asciidoc syntax. To convert the Asciidoc document to HTML, the Asciidoctor processor is used (http://asciidoctor.org/). You can read the Asciidoc syntax from the following links:

Styles (including responsive) are written in CSS. Search and other interactive staff are written in JavaScript.

Regards,

Gleb.

1 Like
#9

Hi Mario
I have couple of questions:

  1. Where did you call/how did you use F1 to call the help content reference to the screenId? Is there any other functionality like calling more than only the screenId contents e.g. contents related to the page but linked to another screen?
  2. How do you move the help info from development environment to production database?
#10

Hi,

generally, this is just a POC and i just mentioned it as a starting point for your development. It has some problems that lead me to write this question. Linking between different content is not part of it. I would assume that it would require another approach of storing the content. So when you want to build something like this, you can just take it as an example…

  1. the F1 shortcut as well as the whole side panel is registered in the ExtMainWindow.

  2. probably with something like this: Test and seed data in CUBA applications – Road to CUBA and beyond...

Bye
Mario

#11

Thanks

#12

@CUBA team,
Do you have any plan for any ApplicationHelp system component or anything like to be part of the framework?