Adding a Help Button
One or more help button(s) can be placed on the Diagram window or child Diagram window when the window is in development mode. Click on the Show/Hide Help button on the toolbar which is identified with a yellow circle containing a question mark symbol.
The dialog provides fields in which you enter the caption for the Help button and the name of the help file that will be displayed when the user selects the Help button in Application mode. This file can either be an ASCII text file (*.TXT), a Windows help file (*.CHM), a portable document file (*.PDF) or an HTML file (*.HTM). Starting with version 9.450, EES will automatically determine the file type independent of the filename extension and display the file appropriately. If the help file name begins with https://, EES will start up the default browser and point it at the URL provided as the help file name. This feature allows the help file to be located on a website.
While in development mode, the Help button can be dragged to any location on the window. Finer positioning is available by pressing the left, right, up, or down arrow keys which move the button one pixel for each press. The width and height of the button can be changed by holding the Ctrl key down while pressing arrow keys. The right arrow increases the button width by one pixel. Left arrow decreases the width. Down arrow increases the height and up arrow reduces the height.
The Professional license of EES provides a field in which a Name can be associated with the Help button. If a name is provided, e.g., Help1, EES will create variables Help1.left, Help1.top, and Help1.Hide. (Note that the names of the attributes that can be specified with EES variable names are underlined when a name is entered. The created variables can optionally be assigned values in the EES program. If an array name is provided, e.g., Help[1], the created variables will have the array index shown at the end of their names, e.g., Help.left[1], Help.top[1], and Help.hide[1].
It is possible to have two or more Help buttons, with only one visible at any time. The two help files provide different help depending on the setting of a Checkbox or Radio Group control. The Help button in the dialog shown above could be hidden with the following EES statement. The Professional license also allows a picture that is stored in a bitmap (.bmp) or JPEG (.jpg) file to be displayed on the button. The picture option is selected with the drop-down control below the caption. A standard file selection dialog box to facilitate selection of the picture file will appear when the picture option is chosen.
Help1.Hide=true#
This statement could appear in the Equations window, a Checkbox control, a Radio Group or a Drop-Down list.