Re: Questions on the Help tool.

John Leasia wrote:
> I'm pretty sure the helpEnabled property setting is broken - 
> http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-3146 but I haven't checked 
> it lately. The Jira is still opened though.  The way that used to work a 
> long time ago was it turned of the help non-tool and the ? icon 
> (non-tool meaning that it is a special thing that isn't really a tool 
> like other tools that can be added or removed from a site). Maybe when 
> it is fixed it should be a little finer grained so one could control 
> either the help or the ? from showing/not showing.

helpEnabled currently just disables the tool help icons (?) from showing up. 
I've submitted a patch in SAK-4464 to change the sakai.properties settings to 
allow the Help menu item or the tool icons to be disabled.

It's also possible to disable individual tools from including the help icon in 
the tool registration file, or to allow individual tool Help to point elsewhere. 
This is documented in sakai_tool.doc and I've put it on Confluence in the Help 
space at

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/HELP/Help+settings+in+tool+registration+files

> > > 1. Is there a way to change the Help Tool to point to an external web
> > > page?  We have a local help web site at Stanford and would like to
> > > take users to this web site when they click on the 'Help" on the left
> > > side.

Lydia, for your requirement you may want to look at changing the implementation 
of getHelpUrl() in BasicConfigurationService.java which generates the URLs for 
the tool menu items and the tool icons. You could change that to return an 
absolute external URL rather than the portal URL which invokes the Help tool.

The other related JIRA is:

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-3146

which is about allowing individual sites to control whether Help is included on 
the menu or not. That would need a site property added or something, and some UI 
in Worksite Setup / Site Info to manage it.

Regards
Stephen

--
Stephen Marquard
Learning Technologies Co-ordinator, Centre for Educational Technology
Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town
Email: marquard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx IM: xmpp:marquard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cell: +27-83-500-5290

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