function readOnly(count){ }
Sign Up ›
Starting November 20, the site will be set to read-only. On December 4, 2023,
forum discussions will move to the Trailblazer Community.
Learn More

Browse by Topic
ShowAll Questionssorted byDate Posted
+ Start a Discussion
mworldmworld 

Help Orb in VF

Is there a way to implement the "Help Orb" with help text in a VF page?

I have an orb in place and it activates and deactivates per usual. By giving it "Title" text I can display my help message when the user mouses over the orb. The span Id is correct for my object and field but that doesn't do anything. While this hack works pretty well, I would prefer to have the real thing.

Code:
<span class="helpButton" id="01I70000000AHdm.00N70000001gKpH">
<img src="/s.gif" alt="" class="helpOrb" title="Please enter a number between 0.00 and 100.00" />
</span>


Any suggestions?

Mauricio
jwetzlerjwetzler
If you're using inputField within a pageBlockSection you should be getting your help text pulled in automatically.  Alternatively you can specify helpText on pageBlockSectionItem if you want to specify something other than what is defined on the field definition.
mworldmworld
Well, that makes sense but I am NOT using PageBlockSection. I have some inputField elements mixed in with some outputText elements. Why? Because I have some data from other objects displayed on the page and to simplify this I use a generic object to hold the output data and get it to the screen. As a generic object it has generic field names and I obviously don't want thoese displayed. Unless I make a separate PageBlockSection for that data (which would screw up my layout) I can't mix the two types of fields. Why can't I mix them? Because they have slightly different label font sizes. Grrrr.
 
Thus, the issue with the help. Hack hack hack.
 
Mauricio
jwetzlerjwetzler
Can you post your page code?  You can use pageBlockSectionItem to wrap fields that you don't want to autogenerate their labels.
dlampdlamp

I feel a bit guilty about resurrecting this old thread, but we have the same need, which is to get helpOrb functionality without using the pageBlockSection (due to our web design team wanting to avoid tables in favor of <div> styling).

 

It's really important to use the SFDC metadata field help text because we provide VFP in as many as 10 different languages to consumers via Sites.  So we want to translate once, and rely on the portal user ID to give us the user's language, and thereby render the correct help text translation for each field without having to mess with all that in the VFP. 

 

I can fully appreciate the SFDC development teams' desire to not have to worry about customers having code dependency on this method.  But then from my perspective, I'd be very happy to not mess with HelpOrb if pageBlockSection didn't force me into using tables. 

 

So my question is:  How much risk am I taking on using HelpOrb directly in my VFP?  This trick seems to have been around for 3 or 4 years (which could imply HelpOrb is pretty stable--therefore low risk).  Thoughts?