Appendix F: Online Help facility

At the top of every screen is a hyperlink called 'help' which will invoke the help subsystem for the current task. The hyperlink will contain the URL http://<domain>/<subdirectory>/help.php?taskid=<task_id> where

• <domain> is your current domain.
• <subdirectory> is the name of the subdirectory from which this task is being run.
• <task_id> is the task identity. This is not the same as the script identity, as explained in Appendix E.

Notice that this executes 'help.php' within the task's subdirectory, which means that it may be customised if desired. The default version works in the following way:

• It will use file help.css for all its formatting instructions. This may be customised if required.
• Before the help text is displayed it will display the contents of file text/<language>/help-header.txt. If this file cannot be found it will look in the subsystem's root directory. An empty file is provided, but this may be customised as required. This file may contain HTML tags as well as plain text.
• It will obtain its text from the HELP-TEXT table if the user's language is the same as the default language. If the user's language is one of the other supported languages the text will be obtained from the HELP-TEXT-ALT table.
• If this text contains a hyperlink in the format <a href='%root%/foo/bar.html>...</a> the value %root% will be replaced by the contents of the $root variable which was defined inside the help.php file, such as in the following example:

  <?php
  //*****************************************************************************
  // Display help text for the specified task.
  //*****************************************************************************
  
  // identify root folder for all help files
  $root = "http://www.radicore.org/php-mysql/menuguide";
  
  require 'std.help.inc';     // activate page controller
  
  ?>
  

  If no value for $root is supplied then the following will be used instead

  if (!isset($root)) {
      'HTTP://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
  } // if
  

• If the text contains a string in the format [copy:<task_id>] then it will retrieve the help text for that <task_id>. This will enable several tasks to share one set of help text instead of having to duplicate the same text for several tasks.
• After the help text has been displayed it will display the contents of file text/<language>/help-footer.txt. If this file cannot be found it will look in the subsystem's root directory. An empty file is provided, but this may be customised as required. This file may contain HTML tags as well as plain text.