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For one of our production apps, we want to offer help to the user by displaying user-guide information using a ‘help me’ page action. We would love to display the user guide in the app when the users clicks the ‘help me’ page action button.

However, the user guide pdf is stored in box.com and its seems like box does not permit embedding using an i-frame widget.

Writing user guide text in a dialog box is not desired as it would mean double work when the user guide gets updated and could lead to inconsistencies. Screenshots are also possible but it means we would have to retake them if something get updated.

Another option is to use links that allow to open the user guide in a separate tab. This is somehow sub-optimal as you have to leave the app momentarily.

Wondering if there are some best practices, tips & tricks for displaying user guide info in the WebUI. Specifically:

  • Recommended ways for offering help in WebUI Apps?
  • Is there any way to embed a pdf or make it accessible via WebUI?
  • Is there any way to bring specific user guide info into the tool without having more than one source-of-truth (i.e. help text in aimms + the official user guide)

Hi Diego!

I see what you are trying to do, but indeed currently you will not be able to embed a PDF. One thing to solve your problem is to use this procedure (https://documentation.aimms.com/webui/library.html#webui::OpenExternalLink) that can open your PDF in an external tab. Which is what I advice you to do if you want to maintain the PDF as the main 'help me' source. 

But now, talking about best practices, the ideal is to have 'help me' informations spreaded in your system. I can be by Side Panel per page, or maybe by Item Action when you want information about a specific information, or even as a Widget Action on a table or graph. This way is better to version control the manual by issue/task (a task is done when the manual is updated), for the testers and code reviewers, they can approve these updates trough git flow. For the end users, small informations in the correct place can be game changer, since the PDF can grow and in time, be difficult to find the correct information. 

 

@Madhu Krishnappa anything to add here?

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