Re: Help Systems in Web Application - Any ideas..

Hi Shane,

I'm currently working on a similar project involving web based PDF
generation.  The PDFs are generated from HTML templates.  All templates and
images are stored in the db.  The HTML is saved as text, and the images are
stored separately as blobs.  It's pretty simple to convert the images to
byte arrays and commit them to the db using hibernate.

Our only real gotcha was handling the image tag SRC attribute.  We ended up
creating an additional rest service which accepts a byte array, commits it
to the db, and returns a token that can be used to retrieve an image stream
via a "getByToken" method.  This allowed us to streamline all of our image
URLs, ie http://service?token=id.

Our templates are currently created manually.  Now that the templates can
be parsed, saved and successfully reassembled we want to add a WYSIWYG.
The textAngular project has my eye but we haven't settled on anything yet.

I'm also interested in any advice on that front.

Best,

Marc
 On Sep 5, 2014 1:17 PM, "Shane Pettit" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I'm reaching out to the members here to see if anyone has worked with a
> requirement where they were asked to produce an in-application help system
> that renders mixed content (Text + Images).
>
> This is the first time I've had this request and was wanting to get some
> ideas / best practices around producing this in an web application
> environment.
>
> Our stack is a common web stack utilizing Spring/Hibernate on the backend
> with a Dojo client on the front end.
>
> The tricky part about this is that they want to be able to produce
> page/context specific help with the ability to do inline updates to the
> help files, linking back to this throughout the application.
>
> In the legacy system, they leveraged some Domino CMS features to achieve
> this.. however, this feels like something a CMS would do well versus
> building an inhouse solution, but I am not aware of any third part
> solutions.  The other aspect is that they have to be i18n compliant and
> will contain images - so storage will be mixed content.
>
> We do not have a media server, nor are they willing to purchase one -
> which makes storing the images a bit tricky as they are pasted inline as
> the content is edited.
>
> Thus, any advice/help in a direction that is both effective and
> implementable by a small team would be great.
>
> Thanks,
> -DaCrazyCoder aka (Shane)
>
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