Infragistics 16.2 Volume Release Also Brings Improved Help Documentation Experience

Accompanying the 2016.2 release, we have some significant changes associated with our help documentation.

New Online Help Viewer

Starting with the help documentation for the 2016.2 release of our developer tools, we now feature a new online help viewer. This website features an improved experience that makes it easier to navigate content among different versions, share links and find technical information you need.

With the new viewer, the browser's location is always in sync with the current topic and search results show up in the primary area of the page layout. The website defaults to a "version-less" mode making it easy for you to find your way to the latest help content. As you navigate, raw URLs always return the help associated with the latest version of the product. For instance the location:

  http://www.infragistics.com/help/wpf/wpf-getting-started-with-wpf

will take you to the latest version of the topic while:

  https://www.infragistics.com/help/wpf/16.2/wpf-getting-started-with-wpf

will take you specifically to the 16.2 version of that topic. This makes it easy to navigate to and share topics from various versions.

From the website itself, there is now a version selector which allows you to select the version of the topic you’d like to view:

This list of versions will continue to grow as subsequent releases after 2016.2 become available. Help for versions previous to 2016.2 remain under the old help viewers and retain the same URLS.

In order to make it easier for you to find your way around the help, the table of contents also remains in sync with the current topic. For instance, if you navigate directly to a page deep into the table of contents structure:

The navigation on the left hand side is automatically expanded to select the current topic.

Lastly, each time a browser requests a file the entirety of the HTML is returned from the request instead of being nested behind a frame. This is important to you because it increases the SEO performance of the topics making it easier for you to find content you want from a simple web search or through our site's search service.

Open Source Documentation

Just as we open sourced the documentation for Ignite UI, we are now open sourcing the documentation for all of our developer tools (WPF, ASP.NET, Windows Forms and Test Advantage) products shipping in 2016.2. This means that you can help play an active role in helping us improve the content and quality of the product documentation. Soon after the release, the repository for each of our products will be available on GitHub giving you the opportunity to create issues, submit pull requests and discuss documentation-related issues directly with our product teams.

Offline Help

The offline help files have also changed in concert with the changes in our new help system. For 2016.2, the offline help for all developer tools products (excluding iOS) are now available exclusively as CHM files. The iOS offline help remains in the same format allowing you to easily launch a local copy of the off the file system in your browser.

Limitations

Each product includes all the documentation (Developer's Guide topics and generated API documentation) in its respective CHM with the exception of Windows Forms. The sheer size in terms of the amount of files involved with building the Windows Forms help made it so that the API documentation needed to be split up into separate files. Unfortunately this means that if you attempt to navigate to an API member from an offline Developer's Guide help topic, you will be presented with a message telling you that the content you are looking for is not in the current CHM. While the link may not take you directly to the topic you wish, each assembly is represented by its own CHM you can navigate to the appropriate CHM based on the assembly name to find the help topic in question.

Lastly, the Japanese release requires an update to the platform installer before it includes offline help documentation. Look for offline help to be included with the first refresh of the Japanese platform installer.

Finding What You Need

Links to all our help, including all supported products and versions, are available at http://www.infragistics.com/support/online-documentation