Contextual help tooltips are a feature to provide additional information about how to use DSpace to less experienced users without cluttering the interface for more advanced users who do not need additional instruction.

User perspective

If the user visits a page where contextual help tooltips are available, a "toggle context help" button appears in the header, in between the language switch menu and user profile menu. Clicking this button toggles the visibility of the tooltips on the page (by default, they are invisible).

When tooltip visibility is turned on, similar looking buttons appear on the page where ever a tooltip is available.

Clicking any of these buttons makes a text bubble appear containing the contextual help; clicking anywhere outside of the bubble makes it disappear again.

Adding new tooltips

Any HTML element can be given a tooltip by setting the *dsContextHelp attribute.

The value assigned to the attribute should be an object of type ContextHelpDirectiveInput:

export interface ContextHelpDirectiveInput {
  content: string;
  id: string;
  tooltipPlacement?: PlacementArray;
  iconPlacement?: PlacementDir;
}

• The mandatory `content` field represents a key in i18n files (src/assets/i18n/*.json5).  You will need to add a new key to this file to store the help text.
• `id` should be a unique identifier for this tooltip, to distinguish it from other tooltips on the page.
• `tooltipPlacement` (optional) determines where the text bubble appears relative to the help button. Its type is an array of Placements; see the 
    ng-bootstrap documentation for more information.
• `iconPlacement` (optional) should be assigned either 'left' or 'right', and determines whether the tooltip will be 
  placed on the left or on the right of the element.

This is what the template looks like for the "Edit group" example in the "User Perspective" picture above:

<h2 class="border-bottom pb-2">
          <span
            *dsContextHelp="{
              content: 'admin.access-control.groups.form.tooltip.editGroupPage',
              id: 'edit-group-page',
              iconPlacement: 'right',
              tooltipPlacement: ['right', 'bottom']
            }"
          >
            {{messagePrefix + '.head.edit' | translate}}
          </span>
</h2>

A few important notes:

• Note the use of the `span` tags: setting `*dsContextHelp` directly on the `h2` element makes the help button appear all the way on the right of the page, instead of directly to the right of the "Edit group" text.

• The 'content' field maps to the i18n key which is used to display the help text.  This i18n key's value may include markdown-style links (only). At this time, other formatting is not supported.  To display a link, use the following markdown syntax in your i18n value:

  "admin.access-control.groups.form.tooltip.editGroupPage": "This is the text that would be displayed in the tooltip. And here is a link to the [DSpace 7 documentation](https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/)."