Appendix F: Online Help facility

At the top of every screen is a hyperlink called 'help' which will invoke the help subsystem for the current task. The hyperlink will contain the URL http://<domain>/<subdirectory>/help.php?taskid=<task_id> where

• <domain> is your current domain.
• <subdirectory> is the name of the subdirectory from which this task is being run.
• <task_id> is the task identity. This is not the same as the script identity, as explained in Appendix E.

Notice that this executes 'help.php' within the task's subdirectory, which means that it may be customised if desired. The default version works in the following way:

• It will use file help.css for all its formatting instructions. This may be customised if required.
• Before the help text is displayed it will display the contents of file help-header.txt. An empty file is provided, but this may be customised as required.
• It will obtain its text from the file <subdirectory>/help/<language>/<task_id>.help.txt where <language> is the language code being used for the current session. This allows help text to be made available in several different languages, and is part of the Internationalisation feature of the framework.
• The contents of file <subdirectory>/help/<default_language>/<task_id>.help.txt is maintained on the MENU database using the Maintain Help Text function, and exported into external text files using the Export Subsystem function. Files in other languages will have to be created manually in different subdirectories.
• If this text contains a hyperlink in the format <a href='%root%/foo/bar.html>..</a> the value %root% will be replaced by the contents of the $root variable which was defined inside the help.php file, such as in the following example:

  <?php
  //*****************************************************************************
  // Display help text for the specified task.
  //*****************************************************************************
  
  // identify root folder for all help files
  $root = "http://www.radicore.org/php-mysql/menuguide";
  
  require 'std.help.inc';     // activate page controller
  
  ?>
  

  If no value for $root is supplied then the following will be used instead

  if (!isset($root)) {
      'HTTP://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
  } // if
  

• After the help text has been displayed it will display the contents of file help-footer.txt. An empty file is provided, but this may be customised as required.