Help topics from application menu

[donaks]

Hi to All,

I have a question about the CSHelp system in symbian: it is possible to open the help topics from application menu, I mean that I have a "HELP->" cascading menu, and I have in that a few help topics(so I don't really need context sensitivity because of the style of my application). In the first round i made that absolutely without the symbians help-engine, with my own "Help View", but in that case the formatting was quite hard, because I think only the Symbian-Help engine can handle .rtf files.
I welcome any suggestions...

Thank You,
DonAks

[david.caabeiro]

Not sure if I get you, but you mean opening the help file outside of your application? You can use the Help app for this (generally on the main menu of your phone)

[donaks]

HI,

Probably I was not clear enough, I mean that, as I know, the CS help works that way that only one "HELP" button is available in the application and when the user presses it, the help topic for the actual application view or state will be displayed. But I don't really need this context sensitivity, I want to display the topics separately. So in my Symbian application I have a cascading HELP menu, with a few topics in it(HELP->Topic1, HELP->topic2, etc.),
and I want to explicitly open a topic...

Regards, DonAks

[david.caabeiro]

Right, then you could do something like this in your app ui:

void CAppUi::ShowHelp()
{
   CArrayFix<TCoeHelpContext>* buf = AppHelpContextL();
   HlpLauncher::LaunchHelpApplicationL(iEikonEnv->WsSession(), buf);
}

CCoeAppUi::AppHelpContextL() will call this:

CArrayFix<TCoeHelpContext>* CAppUi::HelpContextL() const
{
    CArrayFixFlat<TCoeHelpContext>* array = new(ELeave) CArrayFixFlat<TCoeHelpContext>(1);
    CleanupStack::PushL(array);
    array->AppendL(TCoeHelpContext(KAppUid, KApplication_Help));
    CleanupStack::Pop(array);

    return array;
}

So you can pass KApplication_Help (from the generated help hrh file) or any other id you desire.

Regards.

[donaks]

Thanks a lot PushL, that works fine!!!