Re: Displaying context help

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2011-11-01 at 17:28 +0100, Sébastien Granjoux wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> I would like to add an help button in some dialogs in Anjuta. The 
> documentation is using Mallard format. I think I can display the 
> corresponding page running "yelp ghelp:anjuta-manual?_page_id_". Is it 
> the common solution?

Yes. Or if the help is using the new help system, using yelp.m4 as
the build tools, then "yelp help:anjuta-manual/_page_id_".

> One drawback of this solution is that yelp will display an error if the 
> page doesn't exist and Anjuta won't know it. I would prefer to know that 
> the page is missing to hide the help button or display a more generic 
> page. Is there a way to know this?

What you really want is the managed help API I've been working on
for GLib and GTK+.

http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointThree/Features/HelpMenus
http://gitorious.org/ghelp/pages/Home
http://blogs.gnome.org/shaunm/2011/10/25/searchable-menu-video/

This API can completely manage your help buttons and menus based on
tags in the help. Or, if you prefer to keep doing buttons the way
you're doing them now, you can just query a GHelp object to see if
a page exists.

Whether it's ever accepted is still anybody's guess. If not, then
I'll probably return to doing it as a separate library, and make it
available to developers like you that want the functionality.

--
Shaun