HOW TO: Link to Online Help for DotNetNuke®

First of all, I owe my knowledge of this item to Mike Webb from DnnSpired.com.  Thanks, Mike!

When you are navigating through the Online Help for DotNetNuke®, you often may find something that you either want to bookmark, send to a friend, paste into a forum, or otherwise get the URL for.  However, when you look at the URL in the address bar of your web browser, it is immediately clear that the URL to that page is not readily available.

Using a little bit of intuition, it is actually quite easy.  First, take note of the name of the folder name that you last clicked on in the navigation tree.  For instance, if the folder name was "Working with Folders", remember that and URL encode it.  For instance, the previous example will be "Working%20with%20Folders".

The DNN online help is located at the following URL:

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?TabId=787

So how do we use this new information?

It's simple!  Add it as a querysting value!  Here is what it would look like:

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?TabId=787&helpmodule=Working%20with%20Folders

Whaaala!  You're done!  That link will open up right to the expected section of the online help.

There is a problem with this though.  What if there are two different folders with the same name?  Go ahead, you can groan now. 

Well, we can do the same thing with the folders ID number.  Grabbing the ID is not that straight forward though.  You need to grab the ID from the HTML source.  So, using the previous example, the URL would instead be presented like so:

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Default.aspx?TabId=787&cid=539

All I did to grab that ID number was to perform a search in the HTML source for "Working with Folder" until I found the instance of the text that was next to the key or ID number.  Unless you're afraid of HTML, that's easy right?