Help and Reference API Documentation

[Mike.Sheen]

When we do builds or releases of Jiwa 7, we generate the application help and the reference API documentation.

The application help is the help documentation for the Jiwa application - it is guidance for the usage of the software. When a user presses F1 or the help ribbon tool, Jiwa 7 looks at the system setting "HelpLocation" and the Help Page Name of the form (SY_Forms.HelpPageName) to build a URL and then load the Jiwa help help viewer and navigate to that URL.

By default the HelpLocation is http://help.jiwa.com.au/Jiwa7/%VERSION%/. You can alter the help location to redirect to a local copy of help, or a customised version, but by default it directs to our webserver.

The Jiwa Help viewer will substitute %VERSION% in the URL with the version number - so, for example with Jiwa version 07.00.115, calling help will result in the pages within http://help.jiwa.com.au/Jiwa7/7.00.115 being loaded when help is summoned in the application.

We don't yet have direct links to the reference API reference documentation, and this documentation is in its early stages of development - but you can find it under the reference folder of the root help path for the version required - eg : http://help.jiwa.com.au/Jiwa7/7.00.115/reference/Index.html

Make sure you have the Index.html at the end, or the namespace frame will not render correctly. The content is mostly auto-generated - but we have begun putting in specific guidance in some areas, and will expand on that as time goes on (EG : here and here). The documentation is embedded as XML comments within our source code, so as we come across areas of the software where it becomes clear better documentation is needed, we need to just flesh out the XML comments in those areas. At the moment we're going to rely on the comments and questions posted in these very forums to gauge where we need to be focusing our documentation efforts.

Obviously this is far from perfect - and we'll work out a better way to link to the reference documentation - perhaps a link within the Plugin Maintenance form or similar - but I wanted to show that we are developing API documentation, and I thought it might be useful to also know how the help URLs are constructed.

[Mike.Sheen]

Fixed the above post to have correct links - we recently moved the help from on-premise IIS to a cloud hosted Debian / Apache server, so the links are now */Index.html instead of */index.aspx.