macOS Apple Help Authoring - Anchors

Question

I'm trying to make an Apple Help book for my macOS app that I'm ready to release. However, I am trying to make anchors work in my HTML. By Apple's definition:

"Anchors allow you to uniquely identify topics in your help book. When a user follows a link to an anchor, Help Viewer loads the page containing the anchor. ... You can also use anchors to load an anchored page from within your application by calling the the NSHelpManager method openHelpAnchor:inBook: ..."

Example from Apple: <a name="ArrivalTimesUsingStopID"></a>

In my Apple, I have an NSAlert which has the following code to display the help button so that when you click on it, it opens the specified anchor string.

alert.showsHelp = true
alert.helpAnchor = NSHelpManager.AnchorName(stringLiteral: "ArrivalTimesUsingStopID")

Running the code does display the help button and Mac Help does open, but to an error saying that the specified content cannot be found. Not sure why the anchors aren't working because I can access the Help Book if I go to the Help menu and open it from there.

Furthermore, Apple's document states:

The NSAlert, SFChooseIdentityPanel, SFCertificatePanel classes provide help buttons for dialogs. To display such a help button and link it to an anchor in your help book, use the methods setShowsHelp: and setHelpAnchor: in those classes.

and the documentation for these properties in NSAlert state:

-setShowsHelp:YES adds a help button to the alert panel. When the help button is pressed, the delegate is first consulted. If the delegate does not implement alertShowHelp: or returns NO, then -[NSHelpManager openHelpAnchor:inBook:] is called with a nil book and the anchor specified by -setHelpAnchor:, if any. An exception will be raised if the delegate returns NO and there is no help anchor set.

...so I know that I am using these two properly.

I also understand that I need to create a .helpindex file every time I update my Apple Help book HTML documents. I'm using "Help Indexer.app" which is in the Additional Xcode Tools on developer.apple.com. I make sure that:

• I have the option set to index all anchors.
• Any HTML page with an anchor has <meta name="ROBOTS" content="ANCHORS"> in the header so anchors are indexed.
• My Apple Help book plist file correctly points to the .helpindex file created by "Help Indexer.app".

But even with all of this, I cannot get it to open the Apple Help book to the correct anchor or even the Title page of my Apple Help book.

I've read https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ProvidingUserAssitAppleHelp/user_help_intro/user_assistance_intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000903-CH204-CHDIDJFE

from cover to cover multiple times and I cannot find a solution or anywhere online.

I've also tried opening it manually, but it just opens to the same error saying the specified content couldn't be found with the following code:

let bookName = Bundle.main.object(forInfoDictionaryKey: "CFBundleHelpBookName") as! String
NSHelpManager.shared.openHelpAnchor("ArrivalTimesUsingStopID", inBook: bookName)

Using nil for the inBook parameter doesn't work either:

NSHelpManager.shared.openHelpAnchor("ArrivalTimesUsingStopID", inBook: nil)

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is the answer at this point, but it is an answer and one that seems to do the trick. I wasn't able to get the helpAnchor in the Alert to work, but using the help delegate, the method outlined below works.

I started out my day trying to open the Help Book to a simple anchor. I'm sure this used to work using the NSHelpManager in the past, but it does not appear to in recent versions of the OS.

Watching the console while opening my under-development App's help book resulted in the following:

Opening URL help:openbook=%22com.ClueTrust.Cartographica.help*1.5.2d1%22 with application <FSNode 0x6000006a1b40> { isDir = y, path = '/System/Library/CoreServices/HelpViewer.app' }

Opening to my anchor using NSHelpManager resulted in:

Opening URL help:anchor=SpatialJoinOperation%20bookID=%22com.ClueTrust.Cartographica.help%22%20appID=%22com.ClueTrust.Cartographica%22 with application <FSNode 0x6000006a8260> { isDir = y, path = '/System/Library/CoreServices/HelpViewer.app' }

And, it didn't result in opening to my anchor.

I tried appending the *<version> to my URL:

Opening URL help:anchor=SpatialJoinOperation%20bookID=%22com.ClueTrust.Cartographica.help*1.5.2d1%22%20appID=%22com.ClueTrust.Cartographica%22 with application <FSNode 0x600000682c20> { isDir = y, path = '/System/Library/CoreServices/HelpViewer.app'

Looking deeper into the Console, though, I noticed that this is definitely triggering a network request and there's an unsupported URL coming back.

It's not clear to me if help:anchor=... does not function any longer, but I did find a relatively easy, but annoying way around the problem.

Anchors within help will definitely be opened when using a help: URL that is formatted like a file: URL and contains an anchor; and they will open to the correct anchor location.

This requires locating the specific help book and HTML file so that you can specify precisely where to open.

    NSURL *helpBookURL = [NSBundle.mainBundle URLForResource:@"Cartographica" withExtension:@"help"];
    NSBundle *helpBundle = [NSBundle bundleWithURL:helpBookURL];
    NSURL *helpPageURL = [helpBundle URLForResource:@"Spatial_Join" withExtension:@"html"];
    NSURLComponents *urlParts = [NSURLComponents componentsWithURL:helpPageURL resolvingAgainstBaseURL:NO];
    urlParts.scheme=@"help";
    urlParts.fragment=@"SpatialJoinOperation";
    NSURL *finalHelpURL = urlParts.URL;
    [NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace openURL:finalHelpURL];

Basically:

1. Get the URL for the help book (need to do this in a way that gets it from the resource path, hence we're using NSBundle)
2. Locate the page containing the reference based on prior knowledge (in this case Spatial_Join.html is our filename, so we have the bundle look for it by name and extension.
3. Use the NSURLComponents interface to mutate the NSURL by changing the scheme from file to help and adding our achor in the fragment.
4. Finally, open the newly-created URL

It's not pretty, but it does appear to be effective and safe, at least in a non-sandboxed macOS App under 10.15.

Note that I could make some assumptions here about the help book name, but for illustration purposes this seems more clear, and because of the way resources work, it's not clear that those assumptions about the names would be appropriate in all situations.

My final result was this helper method:

- (void)openHelpPage:(NSString*)pageName anchor:(NSString  * _Nullable)anchor bookName:(NSString * _Nullable)bookName
{
    NSURL *helpBookURL = [NSBundle.mainBundle URLForResource:bookName withExtension:@"help"];
    NSBundle *helpBundle = [NSBundle bundleWithURL:helpBookURL];
    NSURL *helpPageURL = [helpBundle URLForResource:pageName withExtension:@"html"];
    NSURLComponents *urlParts = [NSURLComponents componentsWithURL:helpPageURL resolvingAgainstBaseURL:NO];
    urlParts.scheme=@"help";
    if (anchor)
        urlParts.fragment=anchor;
    NSURL *finalHelpURL = urlParts.URL;
    [NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace openURL:finalHelpURL];
}

Call site syntax is:

// to specific anchor on a page
[self openHelpPage: @"Spatial_Join" anchor: @"SpatialJoinOperation" helpBook: nil];
// to specific page
[self openHelpPage: @"Spatial_Join" anchor: nil helpBook: nil];

I tried getting the help bundle with [NSBundle bundleWithIdentifier:] using the help bundle ID, but that returned nil. However, [NSBundle URLForResource:withExtension] will take a nil argument for the resourceName and get the first item that matches the extension. In my case (and I believe many) there is only one help resource, so this allows for a method that doesn't require knowledge of the Application's help book name.

Answer 2

I was finally able to get this working in a sandboxed application.

If you're using a Help button directly, you can use something like:

@IBAction func helpButtonAction(_ sender: Any)
{
    if  let bookName = Bundle.main.object(forInfoDictionaryKey: "CFBundleHelpBookName") as? String {
        NSHelpManager.shared.openHelpAnchor("MY_ANCHOR_HERE", inBook: bookName)
    }
}

If you're using an NSAlert(), you can use its help button with an anchor this way:

let alert = NSAlert()
...
alert.showsHelp = true
alert.helpAnchor = NSHelpManager.AnchorName("MY_ANCHOR_HERE")

A few things I learned the hard way:

1. Make sure your HTML page for your Help Book has a the proper setup for an anchor with:

<meta name="robots" content="anchors"> in the <head> section as well as a proper header tag in the fashion of:

<a name="MY_ANCHOR_HERE"></a> in your <body> section.

2. Make sure you use "Help Indexer.app" to index your Help Book. I found that it will not work unless you index your Help Book using this app. This app can be downloaded from developer.apple.com under More Downloads. They usually release a new version with every Xcode update. You want to look for "Additional Tools" and the specific indexer app will be located in

   Additional Tools > Utilities > Help Indexer.app

3. Additionally, macOS does not like when you have multiple Help Books. This means, multiple copies of your Application on your Mac no matter where they reside. This could be in your Debug folder and your Application folder as your most common places. I found that deleting the copy in my Applications folder usually helps macOS not get confused when opening a Help Book. I have also found it to open up older versions of the Help Book so it's best to make sure you only have once copy of your app on your Mac when debugging help books.

But other than that, they should open just fine with simply an Anchor string and a few lines of code depending on how you display your Help button!