[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Staff client help menu and files

[Jeremy Buhler]

One of the DIG's objectives is to generate staff client help files from The
Book of Evergreen.  On the Evergreen wiki Jason Etheridge described how
future releases are expected to load help files for the active staff client
tab (see http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:custom_help).
Using this as starting point I've adapted some stylesheets to make
selections from The Book of Evergreen available via future help menus.
Here's a draft workflow:

1) All parts of The Book of Evergreen relevant to the staff client are
flagged with the attribute audience="staff-client".  This is a recursive
attribute: if a part is flagged, all chapters and sections within that part
are also flagged.  This is optional but makes it possible to publish a
subset of The Book of Evergreen excluding sections that do not apply to the
GUI.

2) Elements in the DocBook files (chapters, sections, etc) are flagged for
use as help files with two attributes: role="help" and
annotations="path-and-name-of-help-file" (e.g.
server/circ/checkin.xul.help.html).  The path and name of help file
determines the staff client screen(s) it is associated with.

3) Publish a streamlined html version of The Book of Evergreen
(audience="staff-client") with no images.  This is the help file content and
could be stored on the Evergreen server or in any web-accessible location.
Headers, footers, and navigation buttons could be customized.

4) Generate help files following the naming convention Jason described on
the wiki.  These are small html files stored on the server that load the
content generated in step 3.

Attached are a script and stylesheets for steps 3 and 4.  They work in tests
with Sitka's DocBook files but aren't very pretty (remote content loads with
iframes, no header/footer customization, might only work with xsltproc,
etc).  But before doing any further work, some questions for the community:

-Overall does this seem like a reasonable approach?  Is anyone else already
working to link sections of The Book of Evergreen to staff client help
menus?

-How should help files display in the client?  Will they open in new tab, a
column in the active tab, as a pop-up window, or?

-Is there a list of staff client screens with associated help file names, or
do we need to copy them from the console as Jason describes on the wiki?

Any questions, suggestions, and comments are welcome.

Thanks,
Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Buhler
Trainer/Help Desk Specialist
Sitka Evergreen Implementation
jbuhler at sitka.bclibraries.ca
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