Suggestions for providing online help in a struts web app

["Barnett, Brian W." <bb...@scholarinc.com>]

I've written a couple of Struts web apps where the only online help was a
help icon next to some strategically chosen fields which when hovered over,
produced some rollover help text. One problem I found with this approach was
that if I wanted to provide help on a bunch of controls, the page got
cluttered with help icons. Another problem is that the help text is now
scattered throughout all my jsp pages, so any future attempt to create a
User's Guide of some kind using the help text, would be difficult.

I'm writing another Struts web app where I'd like a full-blown online help
system. By full-blown, I was thinking of a complete User's Guide that could
be viewed in full in a popup page (easy enough) but also an iframe within
the user's browser, probably in a right side bar, that would show a
context-sensitive section of the User's Guide, based on where the user is in
the app. This iframe could be toggled on or off with a Help icon somewhere
on each page.

I guess I'm wondering if there are some best practices for this sort of
thing in Struts, or if there is a plugin, library, etc., for developing
online help.

Thanks,
Brian Barnett

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Re: Suggestions for providing online help in a struts web app

[Jeff Beal <jb...@webmedx.com>]

Oracle has a pretty complete help system, including full-text search, 
index, and table of contents, that I've used in the past for 
context-sensitive help on a desktop application.  They also have a 
servlet that uses the same set of files and a web interface for serving 
help over the web.  I've never used the latter, but it looks like 
integrating it into a Struts application shouldn't be too difficult. 
The home page at Oracle is 
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/help/index.html.

-- Jeff

Barnett, Brian W. wrote:
> I've written a couple of Struts web apps where the only online help was a
> help icon next to some strategically chosen fields which when hovered over,
> produced some rollover help text. One problem I found with this approach was
> that if I wanted to provide help on a bunch of controls, the page got
> cluttered with help icons. Another problem is that the help text is now
> scattered throughout all my jsp pages, so any future attempt to create a
> User's Guide of some kind using the help text, would be difficult.
> 
> I'm writing another Struts web app where I'd like a full-blown online help
> system. By full-blown, I was thinking of a complete User's Guide that could
> be viewed in full in a popup page (easy enough) but also an iframe within
> the user's browser, probably in a right side bar, that would show a
> context-sensitive section of the User's Guide, based on where the user is in
> the app. This iframe could be toggled on or off with a Help icon somewhere
> on each page.
> 
> I guess I'm wondering if there are some best practices for this sort of
> thing in Struts, or if there is a plugin, library, etc., for developing
> online help.
> 
> Thanks,
> Brian Barnett


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Re: Suggestions for providing online help in a struts web app

[Joe Germuska <Jo...@Germuska.com>]

This is just a glimmer, but over the weekend, as part of pushing the 
Struts 1.3.0-dev code around a bit, I implemented something like 
this.  In a nutshell, here's what I did.  I'm hoping that our 
direction in the core Struts architecture would make it pretty easy 
for people to put together a package for something like this which 
could be dropped in to an app nearly wholesale.

First, I wrote a simple plugin which reads an XML file (the help 
contents) and sets itself up as the expert on "help" in the 
application context.

As part of the "view processing," I have a command which sets up a 
"page ID" by copying the path from the current ForwardConfig into the 
chain context.  (Effectively, this is a tiles definition name, but so 
far it seems to serve as a good ID.)

Then, I have a custom command which checks my "help" plugin to see if 
it has a "Help" object for the current Page ID.  If so, it puts that 
into the request scope.

In my page, I have some conditional content: if a "Help" object is in 
scope, then an invisible iFrame is set up with its source as a "Help" 
JSP which is triggered using the "page ID" as a request parameter. 
If the user clicks on the link, the iFrame becomes visible and 
displays the help for the page.

(I used a great recipe from Danny Goodman's "Javascript and DHTML 
Cookbook" for the pop-up iframe, which is draggable and even is 
styled to look like an OS-specific window.)

The "Help" JSP actually uses the new feature in Struts 1.3 that 
allows you to run a commons-chain command as a pre-process to a 
forward; this command is a chain which actually uses the same two 
commands from the main process to set up the Page ID and copy the 
Help into request scope, using a configuration option on the "page 
ID" command which tells it to use a request parameter instead of the 
ForwardConfig.  Then the action-mapping just forwards directly to the 
JSP for "help", which is able to get its information from an object 
in request scope.  There's no Action class involved, and I only had 
to slightly modify my command which established the "page ID" so that 
it could use either the request parameter or an ActionConfig.

If I say so myself, I think this is a pretty neat example of what 
we're able to do with the chain based request processor that would 
have been quite a bit more work to set up automatically for every 
page in a traditional Struts app.

Joe


At 1:08 PM -0600 2/7/05, Barnett, Brian W. wrote:
>I've written a couple of Struts web apps where the only online help was a
>help icon next to some strategically chosen fields which when hovered over,
>produced some rollover help text. One problem I found with this approach was
>that if I wanted to provide help on a bunch of controls, the page got
>cluttered with help icons. Another problem is that the help text is now
>scattered throughout all my jsp pages, so any future attempt to create a
>User's Guide of some kind using the help text, would be difficult.
>
>I'm writing another Struts web app where I'd like a full-blown online help
>system. By full-blown, I was thinking of a complete User's Guide that could
>be viewed in full in a popup page (easy enough) but also an iframe within
>the user's browser, probably in a right side bar, that would show a
>context-sensitive section of the User's Guide, based on where the user is in
>the app. This iframe could be toggled on or off with a Help icon somewhere
>on each page.
>
>I guess I'm wondering if there are some best practices for this sort of
>thing in Struts, or if there is a plugin, library, etc., for developing
>online help.
>
>Thanks,
>Brian Barnett
>
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>To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscribe@struts.apache.org
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-- 
Joe Germuska            
Joe@Germuska.com  
http://blog.germuska.com    
"Narrow minds are weapons made for mass destruction"  -The Ex

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