Help Page Topics - v22-appfactory/appfactory-wiki GitHub Wiki

Help information for applications pages consists of three steps:

  1. Create the help page in the wiki using markdown formatting.
  2. Run a script to render the wiki .MD file into a HTML file and place the output in a directory available to the services application.
  3. Update the Pages table in the database setting the helppath column value to point to the HTML file.

Example:

  • File location on the services server: /Volumes/help/sample application/administration/Damage-Cause-Maint.html
  • Value in helppath column: /sample application/administration/Damage-Cause-Maint.html
  • Environment variable for help content path: APPFACTORY_HELP_PATH=/Users/gmarshall/docker/volumes/help

The Help menu item will appear for those menuitem/pages that have a value in the Page.helppath column. If the Page.helppath column value is set to <null> then the Help menu item will be hidden.

NOTE: It is best to make the help content for a page as granular as possible. The help content is displayed at the top of the page so succinct information without images is probably the most helpful when explaining how to input information in the page's form. More elaborate information regarding an application can be provided on other pages within the Wiki.

Running the script

The script is located in the services project: scripts/help/markdownDirectory.js and takes 3 parameters:

  1. Source - the directory of the .MD files
  2. Dest - the base help directory or APPFACTORY_HELP_PATH
  3. Directory - the base directory of the files, both source and destination. The source directory will be walked to get all files and subdirectories.
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