Samwise.js

Samwise.js exists to make it really simple to show your users documentation links that are relevant to the section of your web app they are in.

Support documentation is often managed by a different set of people than those building a product. Embedding links to support documents within your code is a rather inflexible approach and they get easily out of date.

Samwise separates concerns and gives the documentation team full control of which links get displayed in every section of your web app.

How to use it

1. Create a JSON description of the documentation links you want to show
2. Host that JSON spec in a publicly accessible URL
3. Call Samwise within your page to bind it to a button

Example

There is a full example for a dummy app with two sections. The key parts are:

• the URL from where Samwise will fetch the JSON description
• binding Samwise to a section of the app

JSON description format

{
  "sections": [
    {
      "title": "Basic Setup",
      "section": "basicSetup",
      "articles": [
        { "name": "Getting started", "url": "https://www.mycompany.com/help/article/970"},
      ]
    }
  ],
  "footer": [
    { "name": "Help center",  "url": "https://www.mycompany.com/help" },
    { "name": "Contact",      "url": "https://www.mycompany.com/help/contact_us" }
  ]
}

• sections – array of sections in your web app
  • title – section title that will be displayed
  • section – section id (what you pass as a parameter when you call Samwise)
• articles – array of articles that will be shown for a given section
  • name – name of the article that will be displayed
  • url – link to the article
• footer – there are always two buttons in the footer, here is where you define them

API

samwise({
  elem: '',
  url: 'http://json-description-endpoint.com',
  section: 'sectionId'
});

• elem – CSS selector of the element that will trigger opening the widget
• url – endpoint where the JSON description is hosted
• section – section id

Passing the JSON data directly as a parameter is also supported:

samwise({
  elem: '',
  data: '{ sections: [ ... ], footer: [ ... ]}',
  section: 'sectionId'
});

MIT license

Copyright (c) 2015 Victor Delgado http://victordg.com