Web-Based Help System

A major change introduced at Cradle-5.6 is the introduction of a web-based help system, available for both Windows and UNIX systems and compatible with all popular web browsers.

Previously, help information and documentation for Cradle existed in several forms:

• Guides, manuals and reference documents as PDF files
• Context-sensitive text help files for dialogues in the Cradle tools’ UIs
• Hyperlinked PDF help files for tasks, commands, file formats and a reference
• UNIX manual pages

This information is now in an indexed, searchable, web-based help system accessed from redesigned Help pulldown menus in the Cradle tools’ UIs, and from the Help buttons in their dialogues.

The Help pulldown menus have been changed to be as follows, for Toolset:

For WorkBench:

For Document Loader:

For Document Publisher:

For Project Manager:

For SpellChecker:

This ensures that each tool consistent set of entry points into the help system:

• ... Help: opens at the top-level description of that tool
• Contents: opens at the TOC (Table of Contents) section of the help system
• Index: opens at the Index section of the help system
• Search: opens at the Search section of the help system
• Support: opens at the Support section of the help system
• About...: displays the runtime characteristics of the Cradle tool

The web-based help system can be accessed from a Help button in custom web UIs:

The help is designed to work with all popular web browsers to ensure it is available on all UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms and (for the first time in Cradle) on Apple Macs.

The help system is divided into four sections, shown as a stack on the left of the web UI:

• TOC, the Table of Contents that contains all of the generic and tool-specific help:

in which the information is organised into a large hierarchy.

Selecting the top node shows help sections for all of the Cradle tools and reference material. In each subsection is the context-sensitive help information for the Help buttons in the tools’ UI dialogues. The subsections of this tree also contain links to the Cradle manuals and guides that are currently still supplied as PDF files. Clicking the links to these PDF documents opens them within the web browser. In future Cradle releases, the contents of these guides and manuals will also become part of the web-based help system.

• Index, an index over all parts of the help system:

In this index you can scroll to find a term or reference. Selecting it will open the corresponding section of the help. You can also type the first few characters of a term that you are looking for in the field at the top of the index, and the index will automatically scroll to the corresponding index entry.

This means that it is both quick and easy to use the index, either scroll to find links to what you need, or start typing what you need and the index will be scrolled to show the available entries for that topic from which you can make a selection.

• Search, allows searching over all parts of the help system:

You can enter any search word or phrase into the field at the top of the left column and select Search to search all of the pages in the help system.

The results of the search are shown in the left column, ranked with the highest match first. Each result is a link that can be selected to display the corresponding help page in the right pane, in which all occurrences of your search word or phrase are shown highlighted.

• Glossary, provides a glossary of Cradle terminology as an alphabetical list of terms. Selecting any of the terms displays its definition in the right pane: