Hi,
I’m using a combination of JavaScript and XSL to
generate framed WebHelp, and was wondering if anyone else is doing something
similar because I’d like to do a couple of additional things, but not
sure how to approach them.
Before I ask my questions, I’ll explain a few things
about what I am generating.
I have 2 frames, the left frame is the navigation frame and
the right frame contains the individual topic contents. The left nav frame has
three tabs, the Contents, a customised JS search and an Index tab.
1. The Contents uses the same mechanism as CHM
generation.
2. The search indexes all unique words in the help except
‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’, etc., and maps them to
their respective topics. Searching for a word results in a list of topics where
the word exists.
3. The index tab required a little bit of extra work
because it was being generated as a topic rather than a tab. To solve this, I
simply changed the chunking to not put the header and footer content on this
topic, and modified the navigation panel content to include a third tab that
points to this index topic.
Now, I’ll try to explain what else I’d like to
do, without causing too much confusion.
1.
Currently, if I link to an individual file, there is no
navigation panel. I’d like to be able to link to a topic and always have
the nav panel display. Does anyone know how I could make this work? I
have tried several JavaScript options by placing some script code in the
index.html file head tag as well as the individual chunked HTML file head tags.
This should allow linking to a file using http://.../index.html?ch03.html
or something similar. Unfortunately, this does not work as described in this tutorial:
http://scriptasylum.com/tutorials/frameredirect/frameredirect.html
2.
I would like to be able to highlight the search
results in the topics. I know this is a complicated request as it would
require adding tags dynamically around search keywords, then removing them after
navigating away from the search panel or when a new search is performed. Any
ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.
3.
I would like the current topic to be highlighted in the
TOC similar to how the CHM works. This includes expanding the necessary books.
4.
I would like to remove the root topic title from my
breadcrumb link. I have removed this topic from my help as it is not necessary,
but cannot figure out how to remove it from the breadcrumb (we have a very long
product name so this makes the breadcrumb link very long as well). NB. I do not
want to delete the content, only the reference in the breadcrumbs. J
5.
My current index lists an index term followed by any
topic that contains that term. See example below. Unfortunately, because it is
in the left panel, this doesn’t look very nice. I would like to be able
to only show the term, and when a user clicks on that term, a small pop-up
comes up that lists the topics (and their links) where that keyword is located.
6.
I would like to be able to collapse the left navigation
panel.
I realise that is a huge list of questions, and it is likely
that nobody is doing any of this, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.
I have not provided any xsl or js code, but can if necessary.
It is worth noting that I am new to JavaScript and have only
been working with XSL for a year, so I consider myself a beginner, so any information
would be extremely useful.
Thanks in advance,
Laurie Burley