Back link parameter for webhelp

[Boreas]

Hello,

is there a parameter that I can use in my transformation scenario that could display a back link?

The parent topic and the bread crumb parameter bring back the user to the parent topic. Users don<t always want to go back to the parent topic, but just to the previous page.
I understand that the toc is displayed for that, and that the back button of IE does exactly that, but apprently users have a hard time going back to the previous page when in the Webhelp.

also I was unable to hide the parent link and the bread crumbs in the webhelp. I set the parameters to the proper value, but they remain displayed, any ideas why?
hide parent is set to yes and breadcrumbs is set to no.
thanks

[Radu]

Hi Carole,

is there a parameter that I can use in my transformation scenario that could display a back link?....

No, this is usually what the browser does because such a link would have to behave in different ways depending on the way in which the user navigated through the TOC.
I do not know if this is possible using JavaScript, if it is then you could make a customization and add one.

also I was unable to hide the parent link and the bread crumbs in the webhelp. I set the parameters to the proper value, but they remain displayed, any ideas why?
hide parent is set to yes and breadcrumbs is set to no.

For the moment there is no parameter to configure this, the entire link logic is in the stylesheet:

OXYGEN_INSTALL_DIR/frameworks/dita/DITA-OT/plugins/webhelp/xsl/dita2webhelpImpl.xsl

Where you can look what the templates:

Code: Select all

<xsl:template match="/|node()|@*" mode="gen-user-header">

....

<xsl:template name="oxygenCustomHeaderAndFooter">

...

<xsl:template match="/|node()|@*" mode="gen-user-footer">

And possibly comment them out or change what they do.

But we'll consider adding such a parameter in a future version.

Regards,
Radu

[Boreas]

Hello Radu,

does this mean that when you edit a transformation scenario, under the parameters tab, that the args.hide.parent.link and args.breadcrumb parameters don't do anything? and this is why I don't get the expected effect i.e. to hide the links?

Best Regards
Carole

[Radu]

Hi Carole,

The WebHelp output is provided by an additional plugin which is contributed by Oxygen to the bundled DITA Open Toolkit.

The args.breadcrumb parameter is documented in the DITA OT parameters list:

http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/1.5.3/qu ... rties.html

but in fact it does nothing, I proposed them to remove it a while ago but they might keep it for some future work.

The args.hide.parent.link parameter properly works for the DITA OT XHTML-based transformations (except the WebHelp plugin we additionally provided).

We did not provide such a parameter (or use values from one of the existing parameters) for the WebHelp plugin because we considered there was not much usecase in hiding the parent links. That's why this can only be configured from the XSLTs for now. But I added an improvement request and probably a future version of Oxygen will either use one of these paramters to control the output or add a custom paramter for this.

Regards,
Radu

[sorin_ristache]

Hi Carole,

does this mean that when you edit a transformation scenario, under the parameters tab, that the args.hide.parent.link and args.breadcrumb parameters don't do anything? and this is why I don't get the expected effect i.e. to hide the links?

That is correct. Starting with the next version (Oxygen 14.2) the DITA WebHelp transformation will look at the parameter args.hide.parent.link and display the Parent, Next and Previous links in the header of every WebHelp page only if this parameter has the value no, which is also the default value.


Regards,
Sorin