Creating an application help

This topic describes how to create an application help. The device user can launch the application help from Menu > User Guide.

Steps

1. Create a folder in the folder that contains your Symbian application. For example, you can create a folder with name help.

2. Download and extract the help template zip file to the newly created folder. The following image shows the folder structure of the help template:

   

3. Navigate to the following path:

   <help_folder>\xhtml\<LANG>\<Help_UID>

   Where:

   • <help_folder> is the name of the folder that you have created in the first step.

   • <LANG> is the language code. For example, 01 represents English and 02 represents French. For more information on other language codes, see TLanguage enumeration.

   • <Help_UID> is the unique UID for the application help. You can get a unique value by using the application UID of your Symbian application as Help UID. You can also merge help content of multiple applications in a single package and differentiate them through different topics.

4. Unzip the contents.zip file to a folder. It contains two HTML topics, SAMPLE_HLP_TOPIC_1.html and SAMPLE_HLP_TOPIC_2.html. You can rename these files based on your requirements but you must update the index.xml accordingly.

5. Edit the HTML topics to create the help for your Symbian application. If required, you can add more HTML topics to your application help.

   Note: The content of the HTML topics must be in the language that you have selected.

   Sample HTML files demonstrate how to use the various HTML formatting options. The following image shows the different formatting options generated with example help topic:

   

   You can also cross link the help topics using standard HTML linking format as demonstrated in the SAMPLE_HLP_TOPIC_1.html topic.

   Important:

   • The .css files determine the formatting of the HTML topics in application help. The .css files can be found in the xhtml\theme folder. However, you must not modify the .css files as these files are not delivered as part of your package but linked to the system files in ROM.

   • Avoid using advanced formatting options in HTML topics. Only use the formatting options demonstrated in the sample HTML topics, SAMPLE_HLP_TOPIC_1.html and SAMPLE_HLP_TOPIC_2.html.

   • You are not allowed to modify files under the xhtml\theme folder. However, you can add new files (mostly the image files), but the names of the files must not be same as the files in the xhtml\theme folder on any drives of the Symbian device.

6. Open the index.xml file from <help_folder>\xhtml\01\Help_UID in an XML editor.

7. Include all the HTML topics in the index.xml file. For information on how to include HTML topics in index.xml, see Index file.

8. Zip all the HTML files as contents.zip.

   Notes:

   • Use the standard Winzip format to zip the files.

   • Only the zipped files are used in the application help. Therefore, if you have to edit the HTML files again, make sure that you zip them again.

9. Include all the HTML topics in the keywords.xml file. The content of this file is used in search.

10. Integrate and launch the application help. For details, see Integrating and testing the application help.