Merged WebHelp - Home Button

What's covered? A useful button to have on your toolbar is one that will take the user from any topic to the default topic. This topic describes how you can do that. Note: If you use the breadcrumbs introduced RoboHelp 7, this icon is not really needed.

 

• If the target is part of your parent project, the steps are very easy.
• There's a little more to it if the target is in a child project in a merged setup. Nonetheless it is still straightforward.

Target in Parent Project

1. Double click the skin and click the Add icon
   
   
2. In the Text tab displayed, enter a name for the icon, any text the user is to see and create a link to an image.
3. Now click the Action tab and browse to the target topic.
4. Click OK.

In the generated and published help, that button will now take the user to the target topic, no matter where they are in the system.

Target in a Child Project

The initial steps are exactly the same as above. The catch is that because the target is in another project, RH very kindly copies the topic into the skin folder for the parent project.

What's wrong with that?

• The link to the style sheet will be messed up so the topic will not even look correct.
• Any changes you make to the "real" topic will not be reflected in this copy.
• Any links will have the wrong path and will break, thereby defeating all the work that went into keeping all the links in the child projects!

Fortunately it is easily fixed.

1. Before you generate and publish, delete the copy topic file from the skin folder in the parent project. That, not surprisingly, prevents the copy being included in the generated and published folders. You probably only need to do this once, when you add the button. It may be though that other changes to the skin will grab a copy again so check when you change things.
2. Next go to the generate / publish folders and find the whskin_tbars.htm file and open it in a text editor such as Notepad.
3. Near the end of the file you will find a line that you should recognise as being the parameters for the button. It will look something like this
   
   addButton("custom16997",BTN_TEXT|BTN_IMG,"Home","help_home_page.htm" etc...
4. You just need to amend the bit shown in red to include the path to the topic in the child project using forward slashes. It will look something like the line below.
   
   "./mergedprojects/00main/helphome/help_home_page.htm"
5. Save the change and it should now all work from any topic in any project.

Provided you do not change the skin in any way AND do not select the Republish All Files check box in the wizard, I have found this file will not get overwritten in the published help. It will however get overwritten in the generated help.

If you change the skin, the file must be recreated and the amendment made again.

If you do not amend the skin but do choose to Republish All Files, then it will get overwritten. You might like to keep a copy of the edited file to replace the newly created file.

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Topic Revisions

Date	Changes to this page
14 Jun 2006	Note added re breadcrumbs.
10 Feb 2005	New topic.