Question

In the application we are working on we are trying to implement Help. We have a help pdf document and for the moment it has been deemed acceptable that when users click the help button it just opens the pdf. The application is a desktop app and the pdf file needs to be included in the install somehow and installed on the local machine.

I essentially need two things:

1. How would I add this pdf to the
   application so that it is available
   on the client machine after install?
   I can either put it in the resources
   of the project, or else I could put
   it in the Application Folder of the
   client setup installer.

2. How would I open this pdf?
   I can either open this pdf by just
   launching the default pdf viewer for
   the file, or I can use the
   System.WinForms.WebBrowser tool to
   display it. However if I choose the
   second option, I am unsure of how to
   access the file stored in the
   resources or find it in the install
   folder.

If you could please provide me with the code to do this (either in VB.Net or C#.Net) that would be great.

Answer 1

This is how we did it:

Put all the help folders in %ApplicationFolder%/Help. So, your pdf will have the path %ApplicationFolder%/Help/Manual.pdf. You can create a Help folder and put in your pdfs at your csproject, and attach the whole whole to the csproject, and set it to copy always. In this way you can make sure that the pdfs you copy to the Help folder are always the latest.

And copy everything ( minus the pdb files, of course) from your debug folder to your deploy folder.

Then, use System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(pdfPath) to start the help file when the help button is clicked. Here’s how you can get the pdfPath:

Here’s the code snippet:

public void Help_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    var appDir = Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.StartupPath);
    var helDir = Path.Combine(appDir, "Help");
    var pdfPath = Path.Combine(helDir, "Manual.pdf");

    System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(pdfPath);
}

You can test this in debug mode. Just press F5 ( remember to copy the pdf file to the debug folder) and you can get it