In the last step you might have noticed that that the topics fell into a default order which may or may not be what you are looking for. The default order sorts by Topic Type first then by topic title alphabetically. When you entered the last topic - Getting Started with Web Monitor, which is a header topic, that topic floated right to the top of the list.

To override the default sorting mechanism you can explicitly sort topics using the Sort Topics Dialog. To access is click on one of the topics that are to be sorted and right click, then select Sort current topic tree from the menu.

You can select a topic and use the Move Up or Move Down buttons to rearrange topics in the list. The numbers next to the topic is the sort order with higher numbers going to the top of the topic list. This is the same number you can manually set on the Related Topics tab. Higher numbers sort to the top of the list.

Once a list is sorted and you insert new topics Help Builder inserts new topics below the currently selected one.

Moving topics around

Let's add another topic to our tree. Go to the Installing the Software and add another new topic and call it Web Monitor Support Forum. Make this topic a WEBLINK topic and create it.

It turns out that this is not where I wanted the topic - this topic should have gone under the West Wind Web Monitor root topic. So in order to move it you can simply drag and drop it to the new location.

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In this case you'd drop the topic onto the West Wind Web Monitor topic - or the topic you want the current topic added to.

Inter Project Drag & Drop

Help Builder also supports Drag & Drop between different Help Builder projects, so you can copy content easily from one project to another. To do this you need to run two instances of Help Builder. Simply grab the topic and drag it into the content tree of the other project. The topics will be added to the new project as is except the Help Context IDs will be reassigned to avoid any conflict with existing topics in the target help file.

XML Drag & Drop

Help Builder can also drag your topics onto any text capable drop target (like a Word document or a VFP text box or its editor). The resulting output in this case is an XML string of the topic content. Other applications can consume this XML to present help information for example.

The XML format is not hierarchical, but rather just reflects the flat table structure of the Help Project with parent IDs linking topics together. Still, this maybe useful as an export format. You can also export to XML directly using the Export To XML option of the File menu.

See also

Step By Step Guide