Anchors in help-book not working
apple-help, cocoa, help-viewer, xcode4
Solution
Sure David, Thanks for the reminder.
From what I recall and my sloppy documentation I run the following command to index the help documentation files:
hiutil -vCaf ./search.helpindex English.lproj
However one thing that I realized is the index utility will complain any time the ` ` character is used. Instead substitute the character ` `
I think that was the bug in my case.
Problem
I've double checked everything and hoping someone can find a stupid mistake that I'm not seeing. I'm trying to build a Apple Help section for my application and it correctly goes to the landing page however none of the anchors work. The landing page is called `index.html` and the other page is called `test.html` which is located in the `pgs` directory. In index.html I have: ``` <a href="help:anchor=support bookID=com.company.app_name.help">Link to another page</a> ``` In test.html I have: ``` <a name="support"></a> ``` So here's the steps that I followed in order to get to where I am right now: 1) I built the directory as specified by the Apple documentation ``` AppName.help/ Contents/ Info.plist Resources/ shrd/ English.lproj/ index.html search.helpindex pgs/ test.html ``` 2) I built the Help Info.plist as specified in the Apple documentation. Included in the Info.plist I set the `CFBundleIdentifier` to `com.company.app_name.help`. 3) In my app Info.plist I set the `CFBundleHelpBookFolder` to `AppName.help` and set `CFBundleHelpBookName` to `com.company.app_name.help` 4) I then copied the directory that I built into Xcode while ensuring that I selected the option Create Folder References for any added folders. 5) Then I used Help Indexer to index the directory `AppName.help`. Making sure that I select the option to Index anchor information in all files.I then copied the .helpindex file to the English.lproj folder where it's supposed to be. That's it. There's a couple of things that I noticed about my application if I place the following link in the index.html file it works correctly. ``` <a href="pgs/test.html">Click this link</a> ``` Also here is my code for the index.html: ``` <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>AppName Help</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> <meta name="AppleTitle" content="AppName Help" /> <meta name="AppleIcon" content="../shrd/icon.png" /> </head> <body> <a href="help:anchor=support bookID=com.company.app_name.help">Link to another page</a> </body> ``` Here is the code for the test.html. ``` <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Testing Links</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="robots" content="anchors" /> </head> <body> <a name="support"></a>Does linking work?<br/> </body> </html> ``` Here is the Info.plist for my Help file. ``` <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>en_us</string> <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key> <string>com.company.app_name.help</string> <key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key> <string>6.0</string> <key>CFBundleName</key> <string>AppName</string> <key>CFBundlePackageType</key> <string>BNDL</string> <key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key> <string>2</string> <key>CFBundleSignature</key> <string>hbwr</string> <key>CFBundleVersion</key> <string>2</string> <key>CFBundleHelpBookName</key> <string>AppName Help</string> <key>HPDBookAccessPath</key> <string>index.html</string> <key>HPDBookIconPath</key> <string>shrd/icon.png</string> <key>HPDBookIndexPath</key> <string>search.helpindex</string> <key>HPDBookKBProduct</key> <string>app_name1</string> <key>HPDBookKBURL</key> <string>http://www.company.com</string> <key>HPDBookRemoteURL</key> <string>http://www.company.com</string> <key>HPDBookTitle</key> <string>AppName Help</string> <key>HPDBookType</key> <string>3</string> </dict> </plist> ``` Also I followed this post:http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/312037-updating-an-app-help.html to clear out the cache every time I make a change in addition to re-indexing the directory. Thanks all!