Help Viewer

Owned by Anonymous
29 Jan, 2014
3 min read

The help system is an integrated part of the user interface and fully searchable. The entire help system is based on the online manual and can be subdivided into two parts:

  • The "F1 help". By selecting a certain parameter under "Node Params" and pressing F1, you will get the appropriate help text for this particular function. RealFlow’s "F1 help" is directly connected to the "Help Viewer": below an explanation you can find a link, named “Search in help...”. This function automatically performs a search through all help documents and prints out the appropriate results.

  • The "Help Viewer". This is an extra window and can be seen as a kind of catalogue. You can browse through all of RealFlow’s functions by navigating through a clearly arranged tree menu, use the index function or perform a quick search through the available documents.

 

 

The "Help Viewer’s" menu tree includes information about all available nodes. You can expand and collapse branches of this tree and by clicking on one of the topics, the help contents will be displayed. A very user-friendly feature allows you to stack documents with the help of tabs. You can open, close and manage these tabs as required, to provide fast access to frequently-used pages or explanations. To add a new tab, simply right-click on the desired keyword and choose

Open Link on New Tab...

Under “Index” you can find a complete alphabetical list of RealFlow’s parameters. This feature is useful when you are looking for a certain parameter, but currently do not know where it is located. Instead of the “Index” you can, of course, use the search function.

The “Search” Tab

When you start a search from this tab, RealFlow will browse through all available pages and display the results in the form of a link list. To jump to the desired page, you simply have to click on a page's title. RealFlow’s help search is not a simple keyword look-up. It is a sophisticated dynamic search function with many options for finding words, expressions similar to your query, and even Boolean functions, e.g. with or without a certain words. These functions are located under “Advanced search”. All found resources will be displayed in the “Results” area, which is equipped with additional navigation elements to go to the first/previous or last/next page when the search function has found a large number of results.

Please note that the main search field (“Search for:”) cannot be accessed when the “Advanced search” option is active.

The “Search” Field

At the bottom of the “Help Viewer” you can see an empty field and some buttons. In contrast to the “Search” tab, that searches through all available help pages, this function will only search inside the currently displayed help document. It is a local search to look for specific keywords. This feature is very convenient, especially for the “Scripting Reference”. With the “Find Next” and “Find Previous” buttons you will be able to detect all occurrences of the keyword. For a case-sensitive search, just tick the appropriate function. The “Highlight All” feature is a very nice addition to find the given keyword inside the text quickly: the entire page will be dimmed except the requested search term.