How to add/customize help menu on custom components?

Grasshopper Developer
1

Are there any examples or references that show how to customize/extend the help contents of custom components, (developing in visual studio, C#)? Weaverbird is one example that seems to have an expanded help menu?
wbHelp

I am hoping to have the component’s help contents have a bit more info than what is registered here.

public MidiButtonState()
		: base("MidiButtonState", State", "Detect Button Push", "OTools", subCategory: "WIP")
	{
	}

	protected override void RegisterInputParams(GH_Component.GH_InputParamManager pManager)
	{
		pManager.AddIntegerParameter("MidiButton", "B", "Button signal from MidiOut.", GH_ParamAccess.item);
		pManager.AddIntegerParameter("Clicks", "C", "Number of Clicks before setting value.", GH_ParamAccess.item, 2);
	}
2

You have to override the HtmlHelp_Source method on your component, and compose a custom html string.
the Grasshopper.GUI.Html namespace has some classes that are helpful for creating standard content. But there’s a lot of it and it’s uniformly awful so I really don’t want to document it.

None of this integrated html nonsense will be part of future versions.

3

I wrote a different template, overrode

and showed that one in place of the default HTML.

To show the picture, I transformed the image into a base64 data: source.

4

Thank you both for the info! As always, it’s much appreciated. I may just punt and add a link to external documentation…

With that said, is there any discussion on how this might be approached differently in future versions?

5

No public discussion, we pretty much know in what direction it’s going. Separate files that can be edited/translated/added to by anyone, probably based on MarkDown/CommonMark and YAML, with automatic linking done at runtime.

1 Like
6

That sounds great! looking forward to seeing that take shape in the future.

7

Hi,
by now the HtmlHelp_Source methode has disappeared from GH_Component, so I guess the mentioned change had occured. Is there any documentation, how we no can customise the help window?
Thanks.

8

it’s not. I’m using the latest Service Release of Rhino, and I can still override HtmlHelp_Source method.

I guess the changes that @DavidRutten mentioned would happen in Grasshopper 2.

9

Hello Mahdiyar,
you re right, somehow it does not appear at my end in the VS intellisense, that’s why I missed it first, but it is there. Thank you.

10

Can you maybe share any sample code for how you did that ?

and @DavidRutten I don’t seem to find any more the Grasshopper.GUI.Html is it depricated already ?