A good beginning, to be sure; actually, though, the launch page you propose doesn't accomplish much more than just composing the link as the application could do for itself. However, it is probably a good idea to use such a facility, because it could present a page that included the help page if it existed, with options (subject to permissions) to create or edit it, where the "create" option would invoke the editor with a template which would - like most help systems I'm familiar with today - give the user options to view a topical index or search for a topic. The benefit here would be that the index could contain more general help not specific to one page's context, but of course, you could also put code in the template to search for and display relevant topics. Also, if you can put code into the application's context menu, you can make each help-enabled field on the form set a fragment identifier (#anchor) within the help page, to go directly to help text specific to that field. It would probably be better to handle that as a parameter, though, because it would be harder for XWiki to determine whether the field-specific help actually existed and offer to create it. Of course, all that could also be accomplished by means of skinning the space, where the view template did all of the above when referencing a specific application page's help text. And needless to say, automating the page and field naming is a must... brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Esbach, Brandon [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 10:36 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [xwiki-users] RE: xwiki as help system and external mappings
Actually, the warning message is a bit misleading (my bad).. It would only give the #else if you don't have an assigned app or topic querystring (you may need to add checks to ensure they're non-empty as well). You could change the #else to show an index of existing help pages, this way you have an easy index to return to (and would be linked to the help topic in question).
Either way, a change would be added to the script like so (to prevent blank document+blank space): Example code for the "launch.help" page #if(($request.app && "" != $request.app) && ($request.topic && "" != $request.topic)) #set($helpApp=$request.app) #set($helpTopic=$request.topic) #set($openDocName="${helpApp}.${helpTopic}") #set($newDoc=$xwiki.getDocument($openDocName)) $response.sendRedirect($xwiki.getURL($newDoc.fullName)) #else #warning("An invalid topic and/or application was selected.") #end
-----Original Message----- From: RonaldH [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 12 April 2007 16:19 To: [email protected] Subject: [xwiki-users] RE: xwiki as help system and external mappings
Hmm
I think I understand what you mean, or hope I do. The only question that now remains is that you state that I should create a new page per help item. If you mean by this that I should know all the urls in advance and create those pages for it, thats the route I dont want to go, since I dont know all the urls yet in advance and I dont want to maintain all the urls and mappings to the xwiki. I would rather feed xwiki a parameter for a specific topic/url and if that does not exist ask the user to create a help page for this (if allowed to create help that is of course).
Regards Ronald
Esbach, Brandon wrote:
Create a new page "launch.help". Create a new page per help item and application, eg: "mynewapp.createusers" "mynewapp.creategroups"
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