For application programmers, the HP Help System provides a programming ibrary that adds help dialogs to any OSF/Motif application. The library provides two types of help dialogs:
General help dialogs have a menu bar, a Topic Hierarchy (that tells you where you are), and a help topic display area. (See (1) below.)
Quick help dialogs have just a topic display area and one or more dialog buttons at the bottom. (See (2) below.)
The Quick Help Dialog. The quick help dialog is designed to help you meet the first objective of online help: "Get the user back on task as quickly and successfully as possible."
The quick help dialog, which never has more than five buttons, has a simple user interface, which helps keep the user focused on the information. Hopefully the information is useful enough that the user dismisses the dialog after reading it and continues working.
The General Help Dialog. The general help dialog has a few user interface features beyond the features of the Quick Help Dialog. Most notably, the Topic Hierarchy list, which appears just above the help topic display area, indicates the location of the current topic within the hierarchy. The home topic is always the first title in the hierarchy and the current topic's title is always the last title in the list.
Standard Xt Paradigm.
In terms of programming, you interact with the help dialogs the same as you do with any other OSF/Motif widgets in your applications. The two types of help dialogs are defined as two new widget classes: XvhQuickHelpDialogWidgetClass and XvhHelpDialogWidgetClass.
Nearly every attribute of the help windows -- including the volume name and topic ID -- are manipulated as widget resources. For instance, to display a new topic, you just execute an XtSetValues() call to set the XmNhelpVolume, XmNlocationId, and XmNhelpType resources. For more information, refer to “Displaying Help Topics”.
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