creating help for asp.net website

Question

My requirement is to have database based help system for asp.net website, as shown in the image below. i have searched web but could not find even remotely related solution.

Answer 1

You could assign each help item a unique ID (perhaps GUID to make it easier to generate by the developer enabling help for that item).

Clicking on the link opens a dialog, tooltip, new window, whatever. Just have the UI load the help text by ID from the database.

To make this easier to implement in the UI, there are a few ways. Perhaps you can create a jQuery client-side behavior.

your HTML would look something like:

<span class="help" id="#{unique-id-here}">Admin</admin>

and you could have jQuery on DOM load:

$(function() {
  var help = $(".help");
  help.prepend("<img src=\"path/to/images/help.png\" />");
  help.click(function() {
    //do something with this.id; open a popup, a title bar, whatever.
  }
});

Answer 2

We did it on our site by doing the following:

1. We have a HelpTopics database with a HelpTopicId and HelpTopicText
2. We create an aspx page that displays the HelpTopicText based on the HelptopicId passed in the querystring.
3. We set up a css class for the A tag that displays the link to the help with the question mark image.
4. We created a UserControl named TitleandHelp that contained a link to the page mentioned in step 2 and the style for the link set to step 3 above: The usercontrol has a public rpoperty for the title and one for the topicID (We called it HelpContext).

We add the usercontrol to the aspx page where appropriate

<uc2:titleandhelp ID="titleandhelp1" runat="server" HelpContext="4" PageTitle="Forgot Password" />

it may sound like a lot of work, but really it only takes a half hour or so to do all of the setup. The rest of the work lies in populating the table and dragging the usercontrol onto the pages where appropriate.