Reference > Modules, Conditional Output & Variables > Context-Sensitive Help & Popups

A field-level popup is a popup displayed directly from within your application.

The first thing to understand is that field-level popups are actually the same topics as the normal popup topics displayed within your help. In your Help & Manual project the same popup topics can be used for both purposes. The main difference is how they are called:

•	Normal popup topics are displayed within the help when the user clicks on a link in a topic – for example to display a definition or an explanation.

•	Field-level popup topics are called directly by the application and displayed in little windows of their own. This is done without displaying the rest of the help at all. Only the little popup is displayed, and it is closed again as soon as the user clicks on it.

In addition to this there are settings in your Project Configuration that control how popups are handled in HTML Help and Webhelp. (See below for more details.)

Example of a field-level popup:

A context-sensitive popup in an application.

The example on the left shows a popup topic displayed in an application. It is displayed on its own, without the main help file. This example is a Winhelp popup, which supports bold text, but which cannot be used in Windows Vista.

Exactly the same popup could also be displayed within the help with a popup link. It would look almost identical – in the help it would just usually be white instead of yellow. (This is dictated by the help viewer and cannot be controlled from within Help & Manual.)

Help & Manual also supports custom JavaScript popups for formatted popups in HTML Help and Webhelp. JavaScript popups cannot be used for field-level popups however – i.e. they cannot be called from your application on their own.

About creating field-level popups:

Field-level popups are only possible in HTML Help and Winhelp. They are a proprietary Microsoft technology and they are not supported in any other output format.

To create field-level popups basically all you need to do is create popup topics and provide the necessary topic IDs and/or help context numbers to the programmers so that they can make the calls. See About implementing context help for more information on this.

If you are writing field-level popups for an application you may have to produce a lot of popups. You can save yourself a lot of work by generating your field-level popups automatically.

In Winhelp:

In the obsolete Winhelp format you don't need to configure anything to generate field-level popups. The popup topics in the Invisible Topics section will be integrated in the main help file and support formatted text, graphics and links. Context-sensitive calls are made directly to the topics in the main help file.

In HTML Help:

In HTML Help you can choose from three different popup modes. Only HTML Help's native text-only popups can be used for field-level popups called from applications.

Go to Configuration > Publishing Options > HTML Help > Popup Topics to set the popup mode for HTML Help.

Mode supporting field-level popups:

Text-only popups:

This is HTML Help's "native" popup mode. The popups are stored in the main help file in an internal plain text-file, which is called CSHelp.txt by default (you can change this). Calls are made to this file using the standard popup calling syntax of the HTML Help API. No graphics, links or formatted text (bold, italics etc.) are supported.

Modes not supporting field-level popups:

HTML-encoded popups:	This mode outputs popup topics as normal topics that are displayed in the main window of the HTML Help viewer. They are basically just invisible topics using the template of the popup window type. This mode cannot be used for field-level popups called from applications because the topics are not really popups, they are normal topics.
JavaScript popups:	This popup mode uses JavaScript coding to generate popups that can contain formatted text, links, graphics and even videos and animations. These popups also support graphical effects and transitions (fade-in etc.), and can be used in both HTML Help and Webhelp. However, JavaScript popups also cannot be used as field-level popups called from applications. See Using JavaScript popups for details.