Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Programming Interfaces

Calling online help with a help button

Your application should provide context-sensitive help when a user wants to learn about the purpose of a particular window, dialog box, or widget. You can code the OpenEdge application to display a Help button, as shown in Figure 10–6. When the user chooses the button, the Help Viewer displays the help topic for the current window or dialog box.

Figure 10–6: Dialog box with a Help button

For example, when the user chooses the Help button in the Procedure Editor Buffer Information dialog box, the user sees context-specific help for that dialog box, as shown in Figure 10–7.

Figure 10–7: Context-sensitive help for the Buffer Information dialog box

As with menu items, you attach triggers to buttons with the CHOOSE event. In this example, a help trigger is attached to the Help button. In the following code example, a help trigger executes when the user chooses a Help button to access help information from an application window or dialog box:

ON CHOOSE OF b_help IN FRAME x DO: SYSTEM-HELP myhelp.hlp CONTEXT 49154. END.

You can write a help trigger for a field-level widget, a frame, a dialog box, a window, or an application. The following code example demonstrates a help trigger that executes when the current application window has input focus and the user presses HELP:

ON HELP OF WINDOW-1: DO: SYSTEM-HELP myhelp.hlp CONTEXT 49154. END.