Online-Help Addons

Business Central/NAV Developers Forum
1

Hi,

My company is currently looking for a tool to create an online-help for Dynamics Nav. We’ve already tried to generate online-help using the Microsoft Dynamics Nav help toolkit but this process involves a bit to much manual labour.

We’re actually looking for a tool that helps us in creating and building an online-help.

I’ve already found 2 tools that help developers in creating such a help:

  • MergeTool : currently lacks support of pages, although the developer has assured me these will be supported in the near future.
  • Yaveon ProHelp : from what I read on their webpage this tool should to the trick. I’ve contacted them for more information but so far no answer.

Do any of you have any knowledge of other tools which can assist the developer in generating an online-help?

2

Hi Daan,

On what apsects do you want the tool to help you?

b rg

Luc

3

Hello Luc,

What I’d like the tool to do is:

  • Automatically generate topics for each table, table field and page and automatically detect new objects and fields
  • Link related objects → the sales header table has a customer field which references the customer table. It would be nice of the tool could automatically detect this relation and add it to the help file
  • It would be nice if the tool kept track of the documents that were already documented
  • Some kind of RTF-editor to help us edit and format the help topics

I realize MergeTool does almost all of the things I’ve listed above, except is doesn’t support pages at the moment.

The reason why I’m looking for a tool is because our product department wants to provide an online help for our Navision-based product. This product is composed out of a very large quantity of objects (10000+) which all need to be documented. I realize, despite having a tool, the documentation process still wil take lot of time, but I believe a decent tool could really help us in reducing that time.

4

OK, Daan, clear.

For the last two requirements Robohelp (Adobe) might be of use. For the first: I would try and push MergeTool a bit more.

But: have you considered to just create form topics for the pages? As form topics (with same id) will be opened for pages if there is page topic available.

5

Hi Luc,

Could you explain what you main with “just create form topics”? I’m a bit confused at the moment. Create some sort of dummy forms to enable help for pages?

6

Each topicfile name is been build of specific parts that makes it refer to the object it belongs to. E.g. t_17.htm is the file name of the topic that belongs to table 17. Some toher examples:

  • t_17_1.htm for field 1 in table 17
  • f_1.htm for form 1
  • r_206.htm for report 206

In standard NAV form topics (those topic files starting with f_) are used on RTC to link to the associated page. So what I mean is: if you have a page with id 123456700 create a topic for with file name f_123456700.htm Not a dummy but with valid content.

That will do it.

7

Hello Luc,

Thank you for the response. Your solution sounds very simple and straightforward. I’ll give it a try today and see how well it works.

8

And Daan, waht did come from it?