helpFile

Type: String

Availability: Read or write at any time

The helpFile property of the Application class contains the help file name for the application. This property defaults to the help file name specified in the Help File text box of the Define Application dialog in the JADE development environment.

In JADE thin client mode, help file processing is performed on the presentation client.

Although the help file name is usually established at development time, you can use this property to provide access at run time. The file name is not validated. Any changes made to the help file name at run time are not permanent and affect only the current instance of the application. If this property is not set, no help file is opened.

The help file can be Hypertext Markup Language (.htm or .html) files, an Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (.pdf) file, a Windows help (.hlp) file, or a compiled help (.chm) file.

When help is invoked directly via the Window class showHelp method or via the user pressing the help key (F1), a URL is created and the default browser is invoked to display the URL. For Web‑based HTML help, the value of the helpFile property is set to a base URL, as shown in the following code fragment examples.

app.helpFile := "http://www.example.com/prodhelp";

app.helpFile := "http://www.example.com/prodhelp/" & app.version.String & "/";