Launching webhelp from application in consistent browser window

[daver]

Is there any information available, or does anyone have any experience with, launching webhelp from an application? (In my case, a Java application.) Our developer is trying to implement context-sensitive webhelp. However, he has been unable to figure out how to call a webhelp page from the application in such a way that, if webhelp is already open in a browser window, it updates the window (as opposed to opening an entirely new window every time help is requested).

Thanks.

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

I think opening a WebHelp page in a Web browser from an application could be implemented by maintaining a hash map between the set of all contexts where opening such a help page is needed and the set of URLs associated with these contexts. Building the hash map would be an additional and custom step in the process of generating the WebHelp output.

Depending on the platform of your application I think it should not be hard to open a new tab in the default browser window of the platform containing a specific WebHelp page based on the current context of the application. However I think finding a page that is already opened in the browser and just updating that page instead of opening a new one is browser dependent and also dependent on the language of your application.


Regards,
Sorin