There is an upcoming feature on the roadmap called context-sensitive help.
We want to add help links and tool tips (1-sentence rollover popups) to the
CloudStack UI.
I've been working with the CloudStack UI guys on a way to pull tooltip
strings right from the doc source files. This way, we don't have a separate
resource file with out-of-sync texts. We can simply tag phrases in the XML
source with unique identifiers, then the code can feed those strings into
the UI by mapping our text identifiers to the UI element identifiers. We
did a little demo of this and it works really well.
Before I set about tagging everything in the doc repo with these tooltip
identifiers, I wanted to see if we have any comments on the following:
(1) Is context sensitive UI help high priority for Apache CloudStack?
(2) Is the technique we came up with optimal?
For our demo, we added human-readable IDs to the descriptions of some
dialog box input fields, like so:
<section id="creating-network-offerings">
<title>Creating a New Network Offering</title>
<para>To create a network offering:</para>
...
<listitem><para>Click Add Network Offering.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>In the dialog, make the following choices:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>Name. <phrase id="helpNetworkOfferingName">Any desired name
for the network offering</phrase></para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Description. <phrase id="helpNetworkOfferingDescription">A
short description of the offering that can be displayed to
users</phrase></para></listitem>
Jessica T.
CloudStack Tech Pubs
