I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to achieve? the user would normally just press the F1 key to get context sensitive help, so why not prompt them to press that?
The bit I don't understand is
Quote:
include a button on the Opus pub that, when pressed, will display the existing context sensitive help for a particular button/field on the desktop application.
do you want to mirror all the buttons in opus?? or is it one button in opus?
My experience of help files is that they normally explain great detail of what something does, but never how to actually do it, or what buttons to press....which drives me insane
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It seems that windows help files are Help.chm compiled help files.
Does the application have a CHM file??. You could launch this from Opus by attaching a launch action to the button, however this would not be context sensitive.,
There may be a way of adding parameters to the launch command to make it context sensitive, but this still doesn't help, because Opus doesn't know the context at the time.
The CHM files can be de-compiled, but not always successfully, so you perhaps could have a text version of the help which Opus could use.
what you are trying to do is get opus and the application to talk to one another and this is difficult to do.
You need to know how the application flags the context in order to launch the appropriate help. I imagine this will be internal to the application and I can't think of any way of doing that. Do you have the capability to have the application changed? you could have a registry entry set to show the context at the time, then use the de-compiled help file.............which seems to be a lot of work..... when all the user has to do is press the F1 key.
I just see what you are trying to do is going to be such a lot of work, when the facility already exists in the application?
Does the application use a DLL for help???
a very interesting challenge !!
Have a look here
http://www.mischel.com/winhelp/guide.html
perhaps you can find how to start a help file in context mode---which could be added to the Opus launch file parameters??
Sandy