Preventing index.html from appearing when calling context-sensitive help

[jonathanpiasecki]

Hello --

I have a customer using context-sensitive help calls with oXygen Webhelp Responsive.

The customer wants to prevent the index.html page from appearing for just a moment when you click on a context-sensitive help link in their web application.

When you click on a help link, the index.html page appears in a new browser window for just a moment and then the linked topic appears. The effect is that the index.html page "flashes" before the desired topic appears. Users are reporting that this is distracting and annoying.

Is there a simple way to suppress the index.html page if one passes it a help ID? That is, if you call something like this --

webhelp/index.html?contextID=someHelpID

-- can the browser window appear blank until the desired topic is resolved and appears?

If there's no simple way to do this -- say, with a setting or something -- where should I start looking in the JavaScript code to insert something that interrupts the rendering of the index.html page if there is a contextID?

Thanks!

Jonathan Piasecki

[Costin]

Hi Jonathan,

Indeed, the current implementation of Oxygen XML WebHelp always displays the main (index.html) page first and I'm afraid there is no simple way we could think about, so we could not offer a workaround for this for the time being.
However, we have an improvement request already logged in our internal tracking system to optimize the context sensitive webhelp implementation and avoid the index.html being displayed, in order to improve loading speed.
I have just added your vote for the improvement and gave the issue a bump to prioritize it, so we will notify this thread when this will get implemented.

Regards,
Costin