Creating Help Templates

From jVantage

jVantage help templates can be created using any HTML editor. The templates that ship with jVantage were created using Macromedia Dreamweaver. Building an effective help system requires an understanding of how jVantage finds and uses help templates. These templates complete the online help picture shown in Illustration 10. There are basically two kinds of help templates: application level and table level. When online help is invoked from a page in your application, jVantage performs several steps to create help content that is in context with the user's location in the application, by performing the following.

1. jVantage looks to the Root Context configuration to determine where help templates can be found. This value is taken from the Help Template URL field. jVantage expects this value to be a valid URL that points to the document root of the help template hierarchy, such as: http://localhost/jvhelp-jvantage.
2. Next, jVantage looks to the view definition of the page the user is viewing to determine if the technical writer has specified a hard-coded help URL for the context. This is a useful feature that allows technical writers to override jVantage's default behavior in looking for help documents. For instance, a technical writer could decide that when a user views a given page, to ignore the help context and show the user the corporate home page.
3. If there is no hard-coded help page for the current context, the Root Context Help Template URL field is used to construct a template path as follows the convention: http://localhost/jvhelp-jvantage/(application-name)/table_(table-name).html. For example, http://localhost/jvhelp-jvantage/projectmanager/table_associates.html.
4. If the above template is not found jVantage will look for another template following the convention: http://localhost/jvhelp-jvantage/<application-name/table.xml. For instance, http://localhost/jvhelp-jvantage/projectmanager/table.xml.
5. If the above template is not found, jVantage will look for another template following the convention: http://localhost/jvhelp-jvantage/table.xml. If this template cannot be found, an error occurs.

Put another way, the jVantage help hierarchy is designed to allow custom HTML pages to be created for each specific entity type. If no template has been created for a given entity, jVantage will revert to using a template that has been designed at the application level. If no such template has been defined, it will use a default template. To gain a more complete understanding of how help templates are arranged, try viewing the jvhelp-jvantage.war file.