Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Dale Rogerson

Andrew Douglas Reddish

Sridhar Chandrashekar

Justin McRoberts

Wenlong Dong

J Shane McRoberts

Praful Chavda

Alex Aben-Athar Kipman

Christopher Clayton McConnell

Tom Laird-McConnell

Timothy R Sullivan

Scott R Swanson

Madhavi Lakamsani

Paul Glenn McKee

Saurabh Jain

Octavia Petrovici

Amit Rai

Kipper York

Scott Whalley

Jonathan Cannon Gordon

A system for presentation of help files on a computer with an operating system and a display is provided. Presentation-independent information associated with an application is stored on the computer. A help application is adapted to access the presentation-independent information based on user interactions and automatically to select between available rendering applications at runtime for displaying the presentation-independent information on the display.

Mechanism to dynamically host multiple renderers based on system capabilities

A content author provides content to be displayed, including some content elements for which display is conditional on the state of the machine in which the content will be viewed. The conditional statements controlling the display of these content elements, in one embodiment refer to states provided by a state monitor. The state may refer to the state of any aspect of the viewing environment, including hardware, software, firmware, user preferences, software operating modes, and any other detectable state. The resulting content is optionally combined with other similar content via a structural transform. This content is transformed with a presentation transform. One of the transforms checks the states and resolves the conditional statements included by the content author. The result of the transforms is presentation data. A display of this presentation data includes the content which, according to the conditional statements and the state of the viewing environment is appropriate for display.

Activating content based on state

Content including links to behaviors (code which can be executed and return supplemental content for insertion, or can modify existing content) is stored, and at run-time, the links to behaviors are followed and the supplemental content or the modifications to existing comment are used to create a final version of content which will be presented to the user. Security enhancements including a security check ensure that only behaviors which are secure will be run. Default content may be provided, which may be inserted if the security check is not passed, or if the content returned from the behavior is unusable for some reason.

In-place content substitution via code-invoking link

Flexible information appearance and behavior can be achieved with an extensible multi-phase transform engine. The transform engine can apply a series of transforms to markup language content. In a help service embodiment, application creators can specify a Uniform Resource Indicator (URI) for help content, and a collection of transforms and/or executable code for formatting and presenting the help content. The transforms may be custom transforms registered with the help service, or may be selected from a set of stock pre-registered transforms. The transforms can be applied by the engine to the help content. Custom transforms and transform selection may be used to control content appearance and engine output format. Transform operation may also trigger custom executable code to accomplish desired help behaviors.

Systems and methods for supporting flexible information appearance and behavior with extensible multi-phase transform engine

Computer assistance content related to a plurality of software entities is combined into a single assistance content corpus. The corpus may be organized hierarchically. The hierarchical organization can be done using content sets that relate assistance content with associated metadata. Content sets can be related to each other in parent-child relationships. The relationship definitions can be separate from the content set definitions. Scope and bias information can be used to constrain assistance content searching over the corpus and to bias search results based on one or more state variables of the user's computer. A remote assistance server can be used to provide updated or newer assistance content to the user. When the remote assistance server is used, an assistance request from the user is supplemented with scope information.

Computerized assistance content organization, scoping and bias

An active content trust model provides security in a help system. The security is provided in response to a call from a calling application to access active content. When the call is received, a determination is made, based on predetermined criteria, which execution mode to use to access the active content. The active content is then accessed in the determined execution mode, thus providing the security.

Active content trust model

The aforementioned need is satisfied by the present invention in which a help architecture supports an application and a help engine operating on a computer, where the help engine is for locating help topics relevant to the application. In the help architecture, at least one help library stores a plurality of help topics therein, where the help topics are accessible to a user from the help library by way of the computer, and a central store stores topic metadata corresponding to help topics available from each help library. The central store in response to a search request from the help engine locates topic metadata relevant to the search request and returns information from the located topic metadata.

Context-based help engine, dynamic help, and help architecture

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Dale Rogerson