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On December 4, 2023,
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I'm not sure there's a limit on Visualforce pages in a package. Did you run into one? There's a limit on tabs (which includes Visualforce tabs), that changes based on the editions you plan to support.
Best,
Sati
No, I have not run into a limit on VisualForce pages. I just trying to plan ahead a little.
As a followup to my earlier posting on help authoring (by the way, thanks for your response), I'm considering using VisualForce pages for the help. I don't really want to use S-Controls since they are going to be obsoleted and I'm not sure what would happen to updates in that circumstance. I really don't like overriding the help on custom objects, since I can't do that consistently with standard objects (can't be context sensitive in that instance).
So I'm left with custom buttons. And the problem with custom buttons, as I understand it, is that you cannot have relative URL's on a custom button on a custom object, so you have to call a VisualForce page. I'm also considering allowing my users to add help, which in the end would mean a VisualForce page for each help page. That would mean a lot of pages (perhaps 150 - 200) before I was finished. It just makes me wonder if I'm going to run into a problem with that many pages.
My other option is to use something like RoboHelp and link to a URL on my web site from the custom buttons. I think that's doable and results in a much nicer help system, albeit one without the capability for the user to add their own help.
Thanks again for your comments,
JR
Sounds like you have a pretty good handle on the problem space here, but I thought I'd let you know what we decided to do.
We settled on RoboHelp so that we could update the help out of band with the release cycle (docs usually trail dev in our shop). We link to these with S-Controls (URL type) and override the help on our standard objects.
You mention the upgrade-ability of s-controls - they are fully upgradeable. I'm assuming when SF deprecates s-controls, they will provide another way of overriding the context-sensitive help on custom objects the way you can with S-controls now.
Not sure how you'd handle subscriber-generated help in either case. Would you want the user to augment or replace your help?
After experimenting with overriding help, we have decided against it. Its easy enough to override the help on my custom objects with the S-control and I assume that Salesforce will give us a not to difficult way to convert these overrides when S-controls are deprecated. But the only way to override help on standard ojects (as I understand it) is to completely override the Salesforce help system. It is apparently possible to figure out the context when one clicks on the standard objects help links, but not without some java or other code to parse the link. To be consistent, we feel as though we ought to override the help on standard objects as well as custom objects so that when the user sees the Salesforce help link anywhere on the page that it goes to the same help.
I think that we could figure out the context of the standard help links, although parsing them would be a pain in the neck and finding all of them and correctly parsing them would be even more trouble. As an example, I don't really want to provide help on reports, but if I override Salesforce help, then even report help goes to my help pages. If I don't do a complete help override, but use S-Controls to override on an indvidual custom object basis only, then I get back to the inconsistency problem.
I'm thinking of using buttons to go to my help for two reasons.
First, if there is a button, the user knows they are going to my help. If there is a link, they know they are going to Salesforce help. I think the consistency will help everyone keep track of what's what.
Secondly, if i use a button, i can go to a visualforce page and send the context as a parameter. That will allow me to display a page which includes an overview of my information on the referenced object as well as call information that a user site could have entered to augment my help. My page would then provide a link to the actual robohelp files. That all requires more work than I really want to do to build these overview pages, but right now I just haven't figured out a better way to provide my sites with a way to augment help.
Any other ideas or suggestions you'd like to share would be greatly appreciated,
Jeff
I like the predictability of the buttons/links as you've outlined. However, the drawback to buttons is that they are only available on the detail pages of your custom objects. If you were to override the help on your objects, the user could get to it from the tab views, edit pages, and the detail pages. Just something to keep in mind.
I also like the VF solution you describe, in which the user is always sent to the same page, but then their context is used to provide the correct content. You could also do this using the help links. Instead of the s-control being a static URL, it could be HTML and redirect to the VF page, filling in the correct content. This would of course be a stop-gap before SF supports some other form of help override mechanism.