Visual C++ 6 Unleashed

By MICKEY WILLIAMS and David Bennett

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Authors
  • About the Contributors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • How to Use This Book
  • What You Need to Use This Book
  • What's New in Visual C++ 6.0
  • Contacting the Main Author
  • Part I: Introduction
  • Chapter 1. The Visual C++ 6.0 Environment
  • Part II: MFC Programming
  • Chapter 2. MFC Class Library Overview
  • Chapter 3. MFC Message Handling Mechanism
  • Chapter 4. The Document View Architecture
  • Chapter 5. Creating and Using Dialog Boxes
  • Chapter 6. Working with Device Contexts and GDI Objects
  • Chapter 7. Creating and Using Property Sheets
  • Chapter 8. Working with the File System
  • Chapter 9. Using Serialization with File and Archive Objects
  • Part III: Internet Programming with MFC
  • Chapter 10. MFC and the Internet Server API (ISAPI)
  • Chapter 11. The WinInet API
  • Chapter 12. MFC HTML Support
  • Part IV: Advanced Programming Topics
  • Chapter 13. Using the Standard C++ Library
  • Chapter 14. Error Detection and Exception Handling Techniques
  • Chapter 15. Debugging and Profiling Strategies
  • Chapter 16. Multithreading
  • Chapter 17. Using Scripting and Other Tools to Automate the Visual C++ IDE
  • Part V: Database Programming
  • Chapter 18. Creating Custom AppWizards
  • Chapter 19. Database Overview
  • Chapter 20. ODBC Programming
  • Chapter 21. MFC Database Classes
  • Chapter 22. Using OLE DB
  • Chapter 23. Programming with ADO
  • Part VI: MFC Support for COM and ActiveX
  • Chapter 24. Overview of COM and Active Technologies
  • Chapter 25. Active Documents
  • Chapter 26. Active Containers
  • Chapter 27. Active Servers
  • Chapter 28. ActiveX Controls
  • Part VII: Using the Active Template Library
  • Chapter 29. ATL Architecture
  • Chapter 30. Creating COM Objects Using ATL
  • Chapter 31. Creating ActiveX Controls Using ATL
  • Chapter 32. Using ATL to Create MTS and COM+ Components
  • Part VIII: Finishing Touches
  • Chapter 33. Adding Windows Help
    • Windows Help Basics
    • Help Options in AppWizard
    • Help Project Components
    • Authoring Help Topics Using WinHelp
    • Managing Help Projects
    • Calling WinHelp from Your Applications
    • Adding Context-Sensitive Help
    • Using HTML Help with Visual C++
    • Summary
  • Part IX: Appendix

Adding Context-Sensitive Help

You can make your applications much more user-friendly by presenting help for a particular dialog or menu command that the user has selected when he presses F1. This is much easier to use than searching through the whole help file for the information.

Using the MFC help framework, adding context-sensitive help is rather simple. To show how to do this, we will add a new menu command to an application and add context-sensitive help for it.

You will need to add the menu to your application, adding a command handler for it as you normally would. For the sake of this example, assume that the new command is given the ID of ID_MY_COMMAND.

Next, you will need to add a help topic for this command, as shown earlier. For this example, make sure to use the (#) footnote to assign a context name of my_command.

Now, you will need to add an entry to the [ALIAS] section of the project's .hpj file, like the following:

HID_MY_COMMAND = my_command

Now when you build your application, Developer Studio will call on MakeHelp.bat. One of the first things that this batch file will do is call on the makehm utility to map help context IDs for the resource IDs that are used in your application. This mapping is written to a .hm file, which would contain a line like the following:

HID_MYCOMMAND       0x18003

This .hm file is included in the [MAP] section of the help project (.hpj) file. This mapping, when combined with the entry in the [ALIAS] section, will tell WinHelp to bring up the my_command help topic whenever the user highlights the new menu command and presses F1.

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