TRACKING CHANGES TO A COMPUTER SOFTWARE APPLICATION WHEN CREATING CONTEXT-SENSITIVE HELP FUNCTIONS

A dialog box help editor tracks changes to the graphical controls of dialog boxes of a computer software application to assist in the creation of context-sensitive help functions during development of the computer software application. The dialog box help editor receives a selection input for a dialog box of the computer software application. The dialog box help editor displays the selected dialog box. For the selected dialog box, the dialog box help editor determines whether any of the graphical controls of the selected dialog box have changed between the current version of the computer software application and an earlier version. In response to a change, the dialog box help editor highlights the graphical control in the displayed dialog box and provides explanatory information about the change to a user. The dialog box help editor updates a data structure that organizes information for a changed graphical control. The dialog box help editor also updates a data structure that maps graphical controls to help information files for the computer software application.