question

Serge A avatar image
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Serge A asked Ben Wilson commented

Back navigation in the User Manual

The built-in manual is provided in a hypertext format, but there is no evident way to come back after visiting a link (there is no back button and Alt ← doesn't work either). While it's possible to open help files in a standalone browser, they will lack the table of contents and will not be integrated with the F1 lookup function.

This usability issue becomes particularly important in Flexsim 2017, where F1 on a method name opens a User Manual page rather than the Command Helper. As every object's documentation is spread across several HTML pages, it's important to be able to navigate forwards and backwards or to open multiple Manual pages/tabs.

  • Is it possible to configure Flexsim to enable back navigation in the Manual tab?
  • Is it possible to open more than one Manual tabs (to avoid leaving the previous page)?
  • What is the recommended way to read HTML help offline (locally in a web browser)?
FlexSim 17.0.0
flexsim users manualnavigationuiuser interface
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Sam Stubbs avatar image Sam Stubbs ♦ commented ·

This certainly a feature we can pass along to the devs. Thanks for the heads up.

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Mischa Spelt avatar image Mischa Spelt commented ·

To be honest, when I first used the HTML manual, I expected the "previous" and "next" button to do exactly this, i.e. provide browser-like navigation through the pages I visited rather than flip through the manual topics like a book.

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1 Answer

Matthew Gillespie avatar image
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Matthew Gillespie answered Ben Wilson commented

1. There are two different sets of buttons. The Prev and Next buttons (orange) move one page forward or back. The two arrow buttons in Quick Properties (red) are the browser forward and back buttons. Clicking the back arrow will move you to the last page you viewed, not the page right before the current one like the Prev button does.

2. You can only open one User Manual per instance of FlexSim, but you could open a new instance of FlexSim and have the User Manual open in each.

3. You can use Windows explorer as your table of contents. We have plans to improve this in the future.


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Mischa Spelt avatar image Mischa Spelt commented ·

Thanks @Matthew Gillespie, didn't know about the blue buttons! I can understand why it works like this (the Prev/Next are inside the HTML document and probably don't know about the history) but in my personal opinion, from a user viewpoint, these sets of buttons are exactly reversed with respect to expectations. That may just be my personal experience though :)

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Ben Wilson avatar image Ben Wilson ♦♦ Mischa Spelt commented ·

@Matthew Gillespie, could the "orange" prev and next buttons be dynamically renamed with the title of the page they are pointing to? Then it would be clear where they take you. I'll email it to dev.

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Serge A avatar image Serge A commented ·

Thank you. I didn't notice the "red" buttons. It would be nice to add keyboard shortcuts for the "red" forward and back buttons.

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