Online Help Agent

Overview
Setting Up

Overview

The online help agent is a simple way to give your users information. You create a database of help topics that you want your users to access, and they can retrieve that information through instant messages with the Online Assistant users.

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Setting Up

Background

OAT comes with a database of help topics that should give you a base to work from, or at least test out, for this feature.

The topics come in the form of individual text files in the 'Help Files' folder. When a user sends a message 'help xxx' to a pseudo user, the topic xxx will be looked up. The structure is hierarchial, with 'help xxx yyy' looking for a topic file 'yyy' in folder 'xxx'.

Customisation

Each text file in the Help Files folder corresponds to a topic of the file name. For example, a file called 'downloading' would be returned to the user when 'help downloading' was entered.

In order to support a hierarchial system of further information alongside basic definitions, items can be placed inside folders containing a topic name followed by space and then an option-f character.

Help Files Folder

downloading

downloading Ä
[note: the Ä character here is the option-f character as seen in ISO-Latin]

	zmodem
	background
	files
	software

The above diagram shows an excerpt of a Help Files directory tree.

help email help downloading help downloading zmodem

The above examples would all work, however

help files help background

would not.

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