We have a Plone-based intranet populated with documentation for our .NET app, but currently there is no connection between the context-sensitive (F1) help in the .NET app and the Plone content.
Rather than having to create and "push"-distribute (a) CHM(s) and maintain two distinct repositories of documentation, we'd like to keep all the docs within Plone where content can be "pulled" at any time and will always be up-to-date and full-text indexed.
We'd like to be able to allow users to hit F1 and somehow automatically load a URL related to that topic, which could include an anchor (http://intranet/general-topic#subtopic) to jump straight to the appropriate content.
Showing the help content within the .NET app -- maybe within its "Help" window -- would be ideal, but if it needs to instantiate a browser, that might be fine, too.
Ideally we'd like the task of linking context elements in the application to URLs to be performed by the business analysts that are developing the documentation, not developers.
Is this possible? If so, how would we go about creating the "mappings" between each context of the app and the URL its F1 help should display?
assuming your application has some sort of database backend, i would create a table to map between control/forms (depending on how context sensitive you want to be) and their corresponding help urls.
from there it seems like it would be simple enough to either load that url into webbrowser control or spin off a new browser window.