Help Systems

You can create your own context-sensitive Maptitude Help systems to go along with your custom applications or GISDK add-ins. Maptitude supports WinHelp (.hlp files) and compiled HTML Help (.chm) files. The GISDK functions below identify the help files you want to use and launch the Help system at any topic.

GISDK Function	Summary
Help()	Opens a help file at a specified topic
SetHelpFile()	Sets the help file to be used by subsequent help queries

Note that GISDK is not intended to help you create help files. To create help files, use one of the many commercial tools that are available for this purpose.

You can also link menu items, dialog boxes, and context-sensitive menus for certain dialog box items to specific topics in a help file. If you specify a help topic without a help file name, Maptitude looks for the topic in the default help file set by SetHelpFile(); for example:

help: "Help_Systems"

If you include a help file name, you can specify it with or without an extension. If there is no extension, Maptitude uses the type of the default help file; for example:

help: "main.chm|Help_Systems"

help: "main.hlp|Help_Systems"

help: "main|Help_Systems"