"What's this?" pop-up menu

Hello, I would like to know how to create a context (pop-up) menu that just displays a single menu item "What's this?" When they select it, I would then like that yellow-background text box to come up and display an appropriate explanation of whatever they clicked over.

The other problem is this: If I have 10 edit boxes on my user's screen, I want 10 different messages to be displayed through the "What's this?" context menu when they right click over the boxes. How does Windows know which explanation text box should be displayed from the context menu for the different status boxes?

Thanks,
Devin

We use What's This Help Composer which is supplied with RoboHELP from Blue Sky Software.

All you need is a couple of lines of code, a DLL and a help file. The code is explained in the documentation. The DLL is supplied with the software. To generate the help file, you use What's This Help Composer. This provides an easy way of adding the help text to a particular dialog box control.

As for your edit box question, the answer lies in the ids you give to each control. On a dialog box, the resource id for each control is different (except for static text). The help text is then mappeed to the resource id of the edit control.

You can add What's This Help without using a third party product. However, even with small applications, this can be a pain to manage. RoboHELP is a great package for developing help systems. For us, it was worth the money just for What's This Help Composer (which is really just a support application).

As Malc suggested, it's wise to just get a package that does the "What's this?" help for you, and your program just has to make a few simple calls to get it working. RoboHelp is one, and there are numerous others that provide this.

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

Thanks for your help, guys. It just so happened I had a copy of Blue Sky Software's WinHelp in my office, but I just never knew what it did!!

Devin