Vb .net Tutorial - 12

Providing Application Assistance Objectives In this lesson, you will learn to: ☛Create context-sensitive help for an application ☛Create pop-up help ☛Create tool tips for a control

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 1 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Problem Statement 12.D.1 A comprehensive online help system needs to be built for Diaz Telecommunications for displaying help for maintaining customer details.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 2 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task List ☛Identify a mechanism to provide help. ☛Draft the design of the help system. ☛Create the help system. ☛Access the help system.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 3 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 1: Identify the mechanism to provide help. ☛HTML help displays the help content from an HTML file. ☛When the user presses the F1 key at run time, the HTML page containing the help content is displayed. ☛By using HTML Help files, you can display online context-sensitive help to a user. ☛HTML Help Workshop is a tool for creating HTML Help files, which store the help content in HTML format. Result: ☛You will use HTML Help Workshop to build a help system for maintaining customer details.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 4 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 2: Draft the design of the help system. ☛The HTML help system provides the user with two views: ✓ The Table of contents view where the user can select a topic and view the content. ✓ The Index view where the user can type the keyword and the relevant topic will be displayed.

Task 3: Create the help system. Task 4: Access the help system.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 5 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Problem Statement 12.D.2 While maintaining customer details, the Marketing Manager will not be provided any manual assistance. However, the manager may require context sensitive online help while working with the application.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 6 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task List ☛Identify the data that needs to be displayed as help. ☛Create help for the application. ☛Link the help with the application. ☛Execute the application to access help.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 7 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 1: Identify the data that needs to be displayed as help. Result: ☛As per the given problem statement, an online help system needs to be built for: ✓ Adding customer details ✓ Modifying customer details ✓ Deleting customer details ✓ Navigating through customer details

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 8 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 2: Create help for the application. Task 3: Link the help with the application. Task 4: Execute the application to access help.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 9 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Problem Statement 12.D.3 While maintaining customer details, the Marketing Manager may require help regarding the function of a button. The tip should be readily available to the Manager.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 10 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task List ☛Identify a mechanism to provide help. ☛Create the help for the application. ☛Access the help system.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 11 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 1: Identify the mechanism to provide help. ☛Pop-up help ✓ Provides help through the Help button, also called the What’s This button, present in an application to the right of the title bar. ✓ Is most effective in modal dialog boxes. ☛Tool Tip ✓ Is a brief help message for individual controls on a form. ✓ Can be displayed by adding a ToolTip control to the form and enter the text in the ToolTipText property of the control for which the tool tip is to be displayed. ✓ The SetToolTip() method of the ToolTip control is used to set the tool tip text for a control. ©NIIT

Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 12 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 1: Identify the mechanism to provide help. (Contd.) ☛Properties of the ToolTip control ✓ Active ✓ AutomaticDelay ✓ AutoPopDelay ✓ InitialDelay ✓ ReshowDelay Result: ☛As per the given problem statement, tips for each button needs to be displayed. Since ToolTip control is generally used for toolbar icons, you will create pop-up help. ©NIIT

Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 13 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Just a Minute… 2. Identify the methods for providing dynamic help to a user while executing an application. 3. Write a code to set the tool tip text for the button control Button1 and display the tool tip text after 1000 milliseconds after the user points to the button and display the tool tip for 2000 milliseconds when the cursor is kept stationary on the button.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 14 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Task 2: Create help for the application. Task 3: Access the help system.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 15 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Problem Statement 12.P.1 A customer detail maintenance application containing the Save, Open, and New toolbar buttons needs to be created which, when started, displays a message box to the user asking whether or not tool tips must be available for the toolbar buttons. If the user confirms, the tool tips should be displayed.

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 16 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Summary In this lesson, you learned that: ☛Visual Studio .NET allows the creation of three types of help systems: ✓ HTML help ✓ Pop-up help ✓ Tool tip ☛Some of the important properties of the ToolTip control are: ✓ Active ✓ AutomaticDelay

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Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 17 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Summary (Contd.) ✓ AutoPopDelay ✓ InitialDelay ✓ ReshowDelay ☛The HelpProvider control is used to associate a Help file with an application. ☛The Help file to be associated with the HelpProvider control is specified using the HelpNamespace property of the HelpProvider control. ☛The HelpKeyword property under the Misc category of a control is used to set the keyword for retrieving help from the Help file specified in the HelpNamespace property. ©NIIT

Providing Application Assistance/Lesson 12/Slide 18 of 19

Providing Application Assistance Summary (Contd.) ☛If the HelpNamespace property is not set for the HelpProvider control, the text to be displayed when the user presses the F1 key for the control is specified in the HelpString property. The text specified in the HelpString property is displayed as a pop-up window.

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