Help Dialog Boxes

For application programmers, the Help System provides a programming library that adds help dialog boxes to any OSF/Motif application. The library provides two types of help dialog boxes:

• General help dialogs have a menu bar, a topic tree, and a help topic display area. The topic tree lists the help volume's topics and subtopics. Users use the topic tree to select topics to view, to browse available topics, and to locate where they are in the help volume.

• Quick help dialogs contain a topic display area and one or more dialog buttons at the bottom.

Standard Xt Paradigm

In terms of programming, you interact with the help dialogs the same as you do with any other OSF/Motif widgets in your applications. The two types of help dialog boxes are defined as two new widget classes: DtHelpDialog and DtHelpQuickDialog.

Nearly every attribute of the help windows--including the volume name and topic ID--are manipulated as widget resources. For instance, to display a new topic, you just execute an XtSetValues() call to set the DtNhelpVolume, DtNlocationId, and DtNhelpType resources. For more information, refer to "Displaying Help Topics".

Integrating the Help System into an application requires a working knowledge of the C programming language, the OSF/Motif programmer's toolkit, and the Xt Intrinsics toolkit.