Collections users can open context-sensitive help for all screens, list items and all editable fields in the detailed display screens by clicking the question mark icon in the right upper corner of the Collections screen. Help texts are displayed in a separate view. Then the user has to click a field to display the help for that particular field.

Help texts are normally created as text files with the extension .hlp or .adh (the latter from model application version 4.2 and required for Axiell Collections) in the \texts subfolder of your Collections system. The encoding of a help text file may be MS-DOS, ANSI, or Unicode in UTF-8 representation. All Help files for an application must be saved in the same encoding (you can choose the encoding when you save a text file in a text editor).
From Collections 1.17 it's possible too that the help texts are contained in a contexthelp database instead and can be edited in a Collections user-interface.

Help texts do not contain tooltips, system messages and dialog text. These are contained in system text files with the extension .txt. We recommend not to change these files.

The help texts can be edited using an appropriate* text editor, such as WordPad (* appropriate for the encoding type of the file). Make sure you only edit the applic#.hlp/adh files for the appropriate application.

Each help text (i.e. each topic) in a Help text file has to have a unique name, which can be up to 32 characters long, to point to the topic from within the software. This name is known as the help key. In the application setup you define a link between a data source or a method and a Help text, by assigning a help key to the Help key property on the concerning properties tab for a selected data source or method; and in the Screen editor you define a link between a screen (and automatically any of the entry fields on it) and a Help text, by assigning the Help key property of the screen a help key.

By giving the Help files standardized names, with a number indicating the language it's written in, and putting them in the \texts subfolder, Collections knows automatically which files to search for the help keys provided as properties. For instance applic1.adh in the \texts subfolder of a Collections system, provides all Dutch Help texts for the Library, Museum and Archive applications. The full list of available language numbers is as follows: English = 0, Dutch = 1, French = 2, German = 3, Arabic = 4, Italian = 5, Greek = 6, Portuguese = 7, Russian = 8, Swedish = 9, Hebrew = 10, Danish = 11, Norwegian = 12, Finnish = 13, Chinese = 14, Spanish = 15, Hungarian = 16 and Catalan = 17. The language of the displayed Help in the Collections user interface depends on the user interface language set by the user.
Each Help topic in a Help file begins on a new line and starts with two exclamation marks, immediately followed by the help key. For example:

!!DS_ARCHIVE

On the next line is the actual help text for the topic that is displayed to the user. This includes all text (including blank lines) right up to the next occurrence of two exclamation marks. You can enter comments that are not displayed to the user by starting a new line with an asterisk. For example:

* The user does not see this line.

There are two different types of help keys you can use:

When using Collections, the user can obtain help by pressing F1 (Help). Collections then selects the text for that screen, list item, or field, etc., as defined in the application setup.
Note that you can't specify a help key in the properties of an entry field on a screen; it is enough to specify a help key in the screen properties, and add tag-specific help keys (as specified in the table above) and topics in the Help file, and Collections will automatically look for an appropriate field-specific topic when the cursor is in an entry field on a screen or moves over it.

Let’s look at an example. If a user has a detailed display screen open and is currently editing a field with the IN tag (for the Object number field) and the screen has the help key _OBJID_, then Collections will look in the applic.adh file for the line: !!_OBJID_IN. If this is found, Collections will read the text that follows this line, up until the next line that begins with !! and display the text in the Help view.