The text below was written by our team's developer/architect. I am the help author who uses RoboHelp to write content and generate the help files, but I am clueless how it all gets generated and is deployed. Please help. We use RoboHelp 9. I use it in Windows XP and our app and help run on IE 7, 9, and Firefox (multiple versions).
"Our application uses the numeric identifiers associated with the Map ID. For example, to get to the <appname>_home_page.htm file, we use the number 1053. <appname> = pecs, in this example.
All of this is used in a call to a RoboHelp method defined in the RoboHelp_CSH.js file. The mehtod we are calling is the RH_ShowHelp() JavaScript method and the code to perform the call, when you click on Page Help, is this:
RH_ShowHelp(0, ''/pecsHelp/index.htm>pecsHelp',HH_HELP_CONTEXT,topic);
Topic is translated to the Map ID number for the page help. HH_HELP_CONTEXT is defined in the RoboHelp_CSH.js file. This method translates into a URL and from what I have seen, the URL that gets generated is this:
http://{server}[:port]/pecsHelp/index.htm/{server}[:port]/pecsHelp/index.htm#<id=1053>>pecsHelp
Server and port get replaced with the appropriate values. I have no clue how id=1053 is supposed to get translated to mean "pecs_home_page.htm". If you check the PECS_help.h file, you will see the following entry:
#define PECS_Home_Page1 1053
Then in the RoboHelp alias file (PECS 3.0.ali), the following line is in the file:
<alias name="PECS_Home_Page1" link="pecs_home_page.htm"> </alias>
But both of these files are used during the WebHelp generation process and I don't know how the WebHelp generated files handle the Map ID and aliases."