Upgrading Your Existing Help Content

It is possible to reuse Help that you created using the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Help Toolkit for an earlier version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The difference is that you must now use the HTML files instead of the CHM files, and that you have to update the links in the HTML files to reflect this change.

On the Help Server, all Help is in HTML files, and all HTML files for a specific language are located in the same folder on the web server. As a result, there is a significant difference in the formatting of the hyperlinks between the topics. In earlier versions, the hyperlinks must include information about the CHM file that the target topic was in. On the Help Server, all Help topics are in the same folder, so the navigation element is no longer needed.

Updates to Existing Help Content

In earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, if your Help was contained in addin_a.chm, and you wanted to link to the topic How to: Enter Company Information in gl_m.chm, the hyperlink was formatted as shown in the following example:

<a href=”ms-its:gl_m.chm::/html/tskEnterCompanyInformation.htm>How to: Enter Company Information</a>

In the example, the following content describes the location of the target topic: ms-its:gl_m.chm::/html/. However, since all topics are now in the same location, this content is no longer needed. The following example illustrates the same link in a topic on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Help Server:

<a HREF="tskEnterCompanyInformation.htm>How to: Enter Company Information</a>

To convert all of the hyperlinks in your existing Help, you can use a search-and-replace tool to find and replace the navigation content, create a script with a regular expression that handles the conversion, or rebuild your Help project with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Help Toolkit.

If you choose to rebuild your Help project with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Help Toolkit, you must modify the configuration file for the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 Help Builder tool to remove the navigation content from the links that are injected by the tool. These links are specified in the <hyperlinks> element in the config.default.xml file. You can modify those boilerplate links to exclude the navigation content, and you can also update the build number to the following value:

<buildNumber>8.0.Customized</buildNumber>

You can verify that your Help topics work with the classic.css stylesheet by adding the topics to a local Help Server on your own computer. Then, you can add the relevant topics to the navigation pane by modifying the ToC.xml file. For more information, see Help Table of Contents.

See Also

Other Resources

Getting Started with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help Guide
HTML Editors
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Help Toolkit 2013