Adding help to your application
In this section, you learn about adding different types of help to your application. When developing an application, you typically create the user interface first and then provide the necessary help panels. The basic types of help panels are as follows:
Context-sensitive
Help information for the current choice, object, or group of choices or objects
General
Help for a specific window, explaining what the window is for and how it operates
Keys
Any special keys that are available for use in the window
VA Smalltalk has a unique feature for help panels. If help is requested for a part that does not have help settings defined, VA Smalltalk searches up the parent tree structure of the part until it finds a parent part with help settings defined. That part's help is then displayed.
VA Smalltalk also offers hover help for icons on push buttons or in a tool bar. Hover help lets you describe in text what an icon represents.
To show you how to add help panels and hover help to an application, we will guide you through writing help for the main window of the Investment application you built in Getting Started, which looks as follows:
Since the user interface has already been created, we can move on to connecting a help file for a Windows, or a UNIX environment.
Last modified date: 07/02/2020