Dashboard Info vs Wiki

Dashboard Info vs Wiki

FastSense has two parallel help systems. They don't overlap, they don't share buttons, and they're meant for different audiences. If you're a dashboard author wiring help into your own work, this page tells you which one to reach for.

System 1 — DashboardEngine.InfoFile (per-dashboard contextual help)

Set at dashboard construction:

d = DashboardEngine('InfoFile', 'notes.md', 'Theme', 'dark');

A small Info button appears on the dashboard toolbar. Clicking it opens a modal uifigure that renders notes.md via MarkdownRenderer. The modal is scoped to that dashboard — it knows nothing about other pages, other surfaces, or cross-doc links.

Use System 1 when you want to ship operational notes alongside a specific dashboard:

• "Press F5 to reset"
• "The red band is the safety limit"
• "This dashboard's data updates every 30 seconds"
• "Contact the line lead before changing thresholds"

DashboardWidget.Description is the per-widget tooltip-only complement to System 1 — set it for a single info-icon hover string per widget when a full markdown page is overkill.

System 2 — Wiki Browser (project-wide manual)

A new Wiki button appears on every Companion window's toolbar. It opens a non-modal browser pane that renders any markdown in the project's wiki/ directory with sidebar TOC, back / forward navigation, and full-text search.

Use System 2 when you want the user to read about something across the whole project:

• "What is FastSenseCompanion and how do its three panes work?"
• "What does the Tag Status Table window do?"
• "How do I read the Event Viewer's Gantt chart?"
• "What's the difference between the Events log and the Live log?"

The Wiki Browser is a single shared window per Companion session — clicking any Wiki button focuses the existing window if open and navigates to the requested page, otherwise creates the window.

Coexistence

The two systems never collide on the same button. They can both exist on the same workflow because they live on different windows:

Surface	System 1 (Info)	System 2 (Wiki)
Dashboard figure toolbar	yes (when InfoFile set)	no (out of scope for Phase 1034)
Companion main toolbar	no	yes
Companion sub-windows	no	yes (Phase 1034 wires Tag Status Table, Event Viewer, Live Log)
Per-widget hover	Description tooltip only	no

Authoring guidance

• Hand-written wiki pages for System 2 go directly into wiki/. No new templating, no auto-injection placeholders. Pick filenames that do not appear in scripts/generate_wiki.py's PAGE_MAP — otherwise the wiki generator could overwrite your hand-written content on its next run.
• Per-dashboard markdown for System 1 lives wherever your dashboard build script keeps its assets. Pass an absolute path or a path relative to the dashboard's FilePath.

See also

• Companion Overview
• Home