More Advanced Procedures > Working with Modular Help Systems

In this topic:

You cannot use runtime merging for Browser-based Help – it wouldn't make sense because this output format always consists of multiple individual files, with one HTML file for each topic. When you compile a project containing child modules to Browser-based Help all the child projects are always compiled to a single HTML directory with a single index file and Table of Contents (TOC).

However, sometimes you may still want to set up a larger Browser-based Help project with a modular structure, using a separate directory and index file for each module. When you do this the projects in the separate directories are referred to as "collections".

Restrictions with "modular" Browser-based Help projects:

There are some important restrictions and also some important points you need to observe when working with collections and the links between them.

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You cannot use a master project for Browser-based Help projects of this type. If you include "child" modules in a master module all the modules will automatically be integrated in a single output folder, which is not what you want here. Separate "modules" must be opened and compiled as separate collections.

•	You can link between collections but you cannot merge their TOCs.

•	You cannot create links to the target topics in the project files of the other projects because Help & Manual cannot manage links between collections across directory boundaries. You must use Internet links, inserting the correct URLs and/or paths between your planned directory locations yourself.

Compiling projects to separate HTML directories:

•	Open each project and compile it separately, to a separate directory. A Browser-based Help project like this in its own directory is called a "collection".

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If your Help & Manual project files are stored in the same directory make sure that you manually enter a different output directory for each project in the Index Page: field of the Compile Help File dialog, otherwise the projects will all be compiled to the \HTML subdirectory in your project directory, overwriting each other's index.html files and generally creating a fine mess. (You only need to do this once for each project, after this they will remember their output directory settings.)

Creating links between Browser-based Help projects:

Do not try to use the methods described in Creating links between modules for links between Browser-based Help projects output to separate directories. This will not work! Use Internet links (see below for syntax).

•	In Target window: field of the Hyperlink dialog select:

Same as referring topic:	to open the target topic in the current window. The TOC of the current collection will continue to be displayed.
Top frame:	to open the target topic in the current window with the TOC of the target collection. The TOC of the current collection will no longer be displayed.
New window:	to open the target topic in a new window together with its own TOC. The current window remains open.

Syntax for links between collections:

The standard syntax for links between collections is as follows:

index.html?topic_id.htm#anchor

Use lower case:	The names and extensions of all the files generated for Browser-based Help are all lower case, even if the topic IDs used to generate the file names contain upper case characters (all file names are automatically "down-cased" when you compile). This is very important – if you use upper-case characters your links will fail on all Unix and Linux servers and many other systems!
index.html	This is the index file of the target project and it should always be included in the links. Even though linking directly to the topic file may seem to work the browser history may not be stored properly, making it impossible for the user to return to the original topic by using the browser's Back button. By default the index file of Browser-based Help has the extension .htm unless you enter a different extension in the Index Page: field of the Compile Help File dialog.
?topic_id.htm	The ? character is necessary between the index file and the topic filename. Each topic is stored in a separate file and the file name is generated by adding .htm to the topic's topic ID. For example, if the topic ID is HM_Intro then the topic file name would be hm_intro.htm. Always write the entire file name in lower case!
#anchor	This is optional and links to an anchor in the target topic. Note that Help & Manual 4 now uses the standard # hash character as the anchor separator instead of the comma that was required in Help & Manual 3!