To the long list of acronymous tools to help you create SAP Business One add-ons -- B1DE, B1TC, B1TE, B1WS -- comes the latest: B1HM, or officially the SAP Business One Custom Helping Mapping tool.
The idea is simple: SAP provides documentation for SAP Business One -- the Online Help CHM file, available at Help --> Documentation --> Online Help. Parts of the contents are mapped to specific forms and fields in the UI; click F1, and you get help for the current form; click Shift-F1, and you get help for the current field.
But why shouldn't you be able to add your own documentation to your add-on, and map it so your help is automatically displayed when someone clicks F1 when using the add-on? Or why shouldn't you or a customer be able to create help for custom processes, and then attach it to existing screens so that the custom help is displayed instead of the standard SAP documentation?
That's what B1HM let's you do.
B1HM in a Nutshell
When looking at a new feature or tool, I like to sum up the entire functionality in just a few sentences. So here goes:
Purpose
B1HM lets you map documentation -- any type of file, such Word, PDF, HTML, Flash -- to specific forms, tabs and fields. When the user clicks F1 or Shift-F1 for help, you can make it so your help is displayed. Simple.
B1HM does not handle creating or storing documentation. B1HM essentially lets you specify a URI (that points to documentation) for each form/item, and saves this info to the database (new tables SAP_OHLP and SAP_HLP1). It also adds menus for displaying the help, and takes care of displaying it.
New Screens/Menus
B1HM's functionality is controlled on the following 3 screens/menus:
Setup
Available at Help --> Documentation --> Help Settings, the screen is used to do the following:
- Turn on B1HM. (This enables admins to add help, but existing documentation is still visible even if B1HM is turned off.)
- Import a CSV file that contains mappings. This enables you to load a batch of mappings, without needing to manually map each form/field individual (see the next section).
Manual Mapping
The above context menu items are added to enable a superuser to map individual forms and field. After selecting Attach Help, you get the following screen.
Here you can specify one or more documents to map to the selected form/item.
Viewing Documentation (User)
The previous screens/menus were for the superuser. Here's the menus a regular user would see after documentation is mapped:
The following context (right-click) menu is displayed on forms:
The following context (right-click) menu is displayed on tabs:
The following context (right-click) menu is displayed on fields:
It's pretty simple (though creating it wasn't a piece a cake). You can get the source code and modify it yourself. And check out the The “Making of” B1HM: The Custom Help Mapping Add-On that explains the design of B1HM. And you can find out more on the B1HM page.
Next week, I'll take a closer look at how to set up and use the tool.
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