More Advanced Procedures > Using Context-Sensitive Help

Complex applications have a lot of components and controls and if you document them all with context-sensitive topics this means you need to create a lot of topics. This can be a very tedious task and it's also easy to make mistakes, because it means entering hundreds of context numbers and topic IDs that may not have very descriptive names.

Help & Manual can do all this work for you with the help of map files, which are simple text files containing lists of the topic IDs and help context numbers to be used for documenting the controls in the program. These files can be provided by the programmers (they can be generated by most modern programming languages). They have a standard format and syntax and Help & Manual can use them both to apply missing help context numbers to existing topics and to generate missing topics with the necessary IDs and help context numbers.

1.	Obtain the map file from the programmers and make sure that it only contains the topics you want to use.

Plain text popup topics used in HTML Help must have context numbers so make sure you include context numbers in your map file! This is required by the Microsoft HTML Help API for popups and if your popup topics do not have help context numbers they will not be exported to the internal popup text file in the CHM.

2.	Open your project (you might want to make a backup first) and select Project > Tools > Context Tool:

3.	Click on Import map file... and select the map file. A dialog will be displayed asking you whether you want to merge or replace the existing numbers

Replace:
This deletes ALL context numbers in the current project and replaces them with the numbers from the map file.

Merge:
This only replaces the context numbers for topics with matching IDs. All other topics are left unchanged.

Auto-generating topics:

When you import a map file any topic IDs in the file that don't exist in your project will be listed in red in the Context Tool editing box. When you click on OK the tool will ask you if you want to create topic files for these IDs.

If you say yes the files will be created in the Topic Files section, without TOC entries. If you want to create TOC entries for the new topics you must do this manually.