How to add help to Apex pages

This article describes the way help can be added to APEX pages. This is very important to inform the users of the application about the functionalities that are available in each of the pages.

 When editing the page attributes, a user can fill in the page help. This is done in the "Page" part of the page:

The text has to be written in HTML code, for example (for a page containing all the available articles in the blog):

<br>

<table bgcolor="#CCCCCC" width="100%"><tr><td><b>Articles

</b></td></tr></table>

<br>

<b>Articles</b> is the page that displays all the articles that are available for the blog users.

<br><hr>

 

This is the way help is set on each of the pages. The next step is to make it available to the front-end user. For this a new page needs to be created.

 Create a new blank page, called Help, with a certain number (for example 1000), and set it's Page Alias to HELP .

This is how the final screen after creating the page should look like (application number and page number can obviously be different depending on your choice):

 

In this newly created page create a new region, and when asked to choose the type of region, choose Help Text.Give the region a name at your own choice, and choose the No Template region template.

 After creating the region, go in the page attributes area and set the page template to Popup.

 

The final step is to create a new navigation bar entry called Help in the Shared Components->Navigation Bar Entries area. Hit the Create button, choose the From Scratch option, call the navigation entry Help, as target chose URL, and fill in the URL Target field with the following javascript call:

javascript:popupURL('f?p=&APP_ID.:1000:&SESSION.:&APP_PAGE_ID.');

*(or if different, instead of 1000 should be the number of your Help page)

or even better

javascript:popupURL('f?p=&APP_ID.:HELP:&SESSION.:&APP_PAGE_ID.',500,500);

if the help page alias is set as HELP, and 500,500 represent the length and width of the popup help page.

After creating the navigation bar entry, just go the page where you filled in the help field. Run the page, on the upper right corner there will be the Helplink (most of the times next to the Logout link, or other navigation bar entries that were created). A click on the link will open a popup window containing the help text for that page.

 

From this moment on just fill in the help field on each of the pages where you want help and it will be available through the Help navigation bar entry.

转载自：http://www.apexninjas.com/blog/f?p=100:1:4034980738692284.::::P1_ARTICLE:1300