Creating a Modular Help System

A Modular Help system is necessary when you have a collection of several different Help files (and would like to keep them that way) but would like them to appear to the end user as a single Help system.

There are four common scenarios necessitating a Modular Help system:

• Modular software — Your software application is sold as separate modules with the user purchasing one or more modules at a time. A modular Help system will contain all the Help files, but only the appropriate Help files will accompany the purchased modules.

• Large documentation sets — If you wish, you can “chunk” information into several small Help systems and create a modular system rather than deploy one large Help system. Smaller projects enable streamlined updating and easier distribution.

• Help systems with future Help projects planned — If you plan to release your Help system in stages, you can pre-position placeholders for future Help projects before they are released. Instead of distributing the entire Help system each time you add to the system, you only need to distribute additional Help files. If you didn’t plan for an addition, you can distribute a new hub Help file along with the new Help files.

• Documentation teams sharing responsibilities across one large project — Modular Help can be a solution for a large project with many authors. Each Help author is assigned one or more projects. The team leader is usually charged with the responsibility of maintaining the hub Help project and assembling the entire project. (You may want to check out Doc-To-Help’s Team Authoring capabilities and use those instead. See Working on a Team for more information.)

Modular Help systems can reference Help files that are not installed (for example, Help for a software module the end user has not purchased) and still look seamless. The table of contents and index will simply omit the missing information without displaying error messages. If the user installs the module in the future, the Help will be added to modular system in the proper position.

Note: Verify that your software can accommodate context-sensitive calls from multiple .hlp or .chm files before creating a modular Help project. If your software can only accommodate context-sensitive calls from one Help file, you can still create a modular system, but in that case you must place all context-sensitive topics into one Help file.