Ok, now that we've created some content let's back up to the parent topic we created earlier. The Installation could use some cross links that point at the individual topics that we just created. If you recall we had a list in that page that simply showed what we were going to discuss in the subtopics we created just now.

Let's hook them up by using the Insert Bookmarks toolbar button (Ctrl-O). To do so highlight each list item and press Ctrl-O or click on the bookmark icon.

Notice that the correct item was already selected in this list because it happened to match the text we are trying to link. The combo box is AutoComplete enabled so you can quickly find the matching topic you need. You can also bring up the Topic Browser by clicking on the Search button.

When you find your topic in the Topic Browser double click to select the topic. Once your topic is set, click OK to insert the topic into your text.

Bookmark Formatting

Depending on whether you are in textmode or HTML Edit mode Help Builder injects the following code into your topics:

Text Mode:

<<%= TopicLink([Running the Setup Program],[Running the Setup Program]) %>>

where the second parameter can be either a TopicID (_1FDESD100) or the name of a topic. Help Builder always inserts the Topic Id.

Html Edit Mode:

<A href="VFPS://Topic/_1FT1CHVJX">Web Monitor Configuration Form</A>

were the second parameter is the topic ID. In both cases Help Builder parses these links into the appropriate type of link to generate for Preview, HTML, Word or HTML Help output. You can use these same formats for manually injecting links.

Editing Bookmark Links

In Html Edit mode you can simply right click on any hyper link and get a dialog that shows you the link's content. If the content is a Bookmark the Bookmark dialog pops back up. In text mode, there is no support for editing Bookmarks

Finding Broken Links

As you create crosslinks to other topics and you edit your text it may very well happen that cross links get broken (for example when you delete a topic - although renaming topics automatically tries to update all crosslinks). You can easily find broken links using the Fix Links Dialog available off the Tools menu:

Let's look at the following topic text here and let's intentionally mispell one of the topics to link to:

After you have <<%= TopicLink([downloaded],[Dwnloading the Software]) %> > the software a Setup program fires up. This program simply copies the files into the proper locations.

The next step is to <<%= TopicLink([configure the sites monitored],[Configuring the sites to be monitored]) %> <.

Now let's move to another topic in the tree. Then click on Tools|Fix Links and what you'll see is:

This dialog shows all internal links (using the TOPICLINK() function) that are pointing to invalid topics. If you double click on any link you'll be taken to the topic in question with the topic link highlighted. You can also fix an individual link wholesale in the whole Help Project by clicking on the Fix Links button:

It'll show you the selected link topic text and what you want to change it to. Select a valid topic and all topics in the help file are updated with the new link information.

This functionality can be a huge timesaver and we suggest you run this utililty from time to time to check up on your help file's link health. If you do it frequently you should only have a few links to fix if any and the process is very manageable.

See also

Step By Step Guide