Bret,
I'm sure that internally VFP does one of two things. 1) It simply tracks the HCId property of each control in the GotFocus. If a control does not have an HCId it'll use the HCId of the form. 2) It doesn't worry about anything until F1 is pressed it looks at the current control, then form, then SET TOPIC ID.
The HCId gets passed to the Help engine which does the lookup in it's own table of TopicIDs. If you look at the article on my website there are a couple of SYS() calls you can use to help track HCIds going into the help engine.
The issue Menachem is probably running into is trying to use the #DEFINE item on the property sheet instead of the numeric value like you.
FWIW I
rarely ever go through the effort of doing a HCId for every control. I set one for each form, then I put an image of the form in the help file and hotspot each control so the user can get popup or full topic for the control.
>I have it working, but I'm not sure how it works. I have #DEFINEs generated by ForeHelp (demo version) and put the actual numbers (not the #DEFINEd constant names) in the property sheets. How does vfp know that these #DEFINEs refer to help topics, and any other #DEFINEs I might have do not? When I hit F1 and vfp finds a non-zero help context ID for my form or object, what does it actually do next to find the right topic?
>
>I'm getting the impression that just putting these numbers into the property sheet is not the smart way, since I have to keep track of them somehow. What is the smart way to make the vfp numbers automatically agree with the numbers in various help builder projects? I tried the West Wind demo, which automatically generates topic names and numbers, and generates an #INCLUDE file. I didn't see any function or builder that coordinates them with your actual program objects. Did I miss it?
>
>ForeHelp has a wizard that detects Help Context IDs in a compiled program. When I tried it, the wizard started asking me for the names of .DLLs in my program. I figured it wasn't going to work with a vfp program.
>
>I suppose that an interactive builder could coordinate these things, displaying a list of the topic names in the #INCLUDE file and a list of all objects in a vfp project that have the HelpContextID property and prompting the user to match them up. It could then open the forms and change that property in each object that had a chosen topic.
