Parsware
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Parsware Platform

Help on every screen

Every screen in Parsware has a Help link in the same corner, and it opens the page about that screen, not the front of a manual. It opens it in your language, too: a Persian maker gets the Persian page, an Arabic reader the Arabic one. We followed it from the maker portal and from an app, in three languages.

The help page Publish an app as a portal in Persian, right to left, with its table of contents, next to the title "Help on every screen"

Help that people have to go looking for is help nobody reads. So every screen in the platform carries a link to its own page, and the link always sits in the same place: the top bar, just before the language menu. This article follows it from two screens, in English, Persian and Arabic.

The link

On the Portals page of a solution, the ? in the top bar is the Help link. Its tooltip says Help (opens in a new tab), because it does:

The top bar of the maker portal: Environment Development, the Help button highlighted, then the language menu, the dark and light switch, the settings gear and the user avatar

It opens Publish an app as a portal, the page for the screen you were on, rather than the help site's front page:

The help page Publish an app as a portal in English: Goal, Before you start, and the steps, with the maker section's navigation on the left and the page's contents on the right

In your language

Switch the maker portal to فارسی and the same button, now on the left because the page has mirrored, opens the Persian page:

The top bar of the maker portal in Persian: the avatar, settings, theme switch, language menu and the highlighted Help button from the left, and the environment picker

The same help page in Persian, right to left: انتشار یک برنامه به‌صورت درگاه, with its goal, its steps and the navigation on the right

The help site ships in the same seven languages as the product, and both read them from the same list, so the two can't offer different languages.

From an app

The Platform Shell does the same for people using apps rather than building them. In Arabic, on the bookings calendar in the Room Bookings app:

The top bar of the Platform Shell in Arabic, with the Help button highlighted

it opens Work with records in a view in Arabic, a page written for the person using the app, not for its maker:

The help page Work with records in a view in Arabic, right to left, with the end-user section's pages listed on the right

Why it doesn't go stale

A link can't point at a page that isn't there. Each screen names its help topic, every topic is listed in one file per app, and a test fails the build if any topic has no page in any of the seven languages. So an English page without its Persian twin, or a new screen whose link points nowhere, stops the build rather than reaching a reader.

Try it

Open any screen in the maker portal or an app and press the ? in the top bar. Then switch the language and press it again.

Next: Building for more than one language.