SharePoint 2010 extended the context help
experience to users and allows the developers easily creating and customizing
the help topics for their products deployed on SharePoint. This post will focus
on how to customize the SharePoint 2010 context help and make the context
sensitive help worked on your pages.
Enable Custom Site Collection Help
On the Site Settings of the top level site
in the site collection, activate the Site Collection Feature “Custom Site
Collection Help”.
It will create a document library “Site Collection Help” for hosting the help content available for whole site collection.
Create Help Collection
Create a new Help Collection folder in “Site Collection Help” document library.
Specify the Name, Title, Locale ID, and
Product Name. Locale ID specify the language that the Help collection is in (For
example, 1033 means English). Product is the identifier of this help
collection.
Enable this Help Collection in Site Settings
-> Site Collection Administration -> Help settings.
Create Help Categories and Add Help Topics
Help Category is a named folder you can put
the help article (topic), it provides a way to group the help topics by subject
and list with a table of contents. Help Topic is the actual HTML article created
and uploaded by user, and associated with a context key which will be associated
to the custom SharePoint web page to enable the context sensitive
help.
In this post, we will use the web page name as the Context Key, so the javascript in the masterpage could automatically find help topic by the page name. For example, if you have created a web part page called page1.aspx, you will have page1 as the Context Key here.
Modify Master Page to Enable the Context Sensitive Help in Help Button and by F1 Key
Add following javascript to your master page, it parses the current URL and gets the page name; set the context key and register the F1 key.
// get current page path and name
var currentUrl = window.location.pathname;
// if it is not a system page
if (currentUrl.indexOf('/_layouts') < 0) {
// get the page name
var d = currentUrl.lastIndexOf('.');var s = currentUrl.lastIndexOf('/') + 1;
var sPage = currentUrl.substring(s, d);
// remove space
sPage = sPage.replace("%20", "");sPage = sPage.replace(" ", "");
// set context sensitive key
navBarHelpOverrideKey = "WSSEndUser_" +
sPage;
// set the F1 key
WPSC.RegisterForEvent("urn:schemas-microsoft-com:dhtml", "onhelp", ShowHelp);}
function ShowHelp() {
HelpWindowKey(navBarHelpOverrideKey);
return false;
}
After everything done, load your page, and
click on the help button, or press F1 in the keyboard, you will see the help
article in a popup window like:
