How to open a specific topic in a help system?

For a Web Help system:

If you need to integrate a Web Help system, you can find the list of supported URL parameters at the link below.

The easiest way is to link to the .HTML file of a specific topic directly:
https://www.helpsmith.com/webhelp/topics/context-sensitive-help-web-help.htm

To get the URL address of a topic:

1. Open your Web Help system in the browser.
2. In the Table of Contents, right-click on the topic to which you want to create a link.
3. In the popup menu, click the appropriate command to copy the link location to the Clipboard.
4. Now you can simply share the copied link with others (Ctrl+V), or insert it into an HTML page on your website.

Remark:

Please note that for a Web Help system to work properly, it should be located and accessed from a web server via the http:// (or https://) protocol, but not via the file:// protocol. Otherwise, the Context-sensitive Help and other functions may not work properly due to security restrictions which are applied to local HTML files by modern web browsers.

For HTML Help (CHM):

If you need to integrate a .CHM help file with your desktop application, it depends on your development IDE that can provide built-in methods to operate with a .CHM help file.

Alternatively, you can use HTML Help API directly. You can search for the HTMLHelp() function in Microsoft documentation.

Also, for HTML Help (CHM), you can find code examples for different IDEs on our website at:
https://www.helpsmith.com/articles.php

Exporting the topic list as a header file

Please note that HelpSmith allows you to export the topic list into a header file (as mentioned here), which you can include directly into the code of your application.

The header file contains the IDs values of topics (as constants) associated with their Context numbers, which can be passed to the HTMLHelp() function to call a specific topic, etc.