Overview#
A platform administrator at a regional police service is onboarding 200 new users ahead of a major system rollout. Rather than fielding the same questions repeatedly, she builds a set of help articles directly in the platform: how to create an investigation, how to attach evidence, how to run a graph query. Each article is organised into a category, tagged for easy search, and published only once it is reviewed. Users find answers without raising support tickets, and she can update articles as the platform evolves without involving technical staff. The Help Center domain provides the full in-application knowledge base to make this work.
Embedded help reduces the cognitive load on new users and reduces the support burden on administrators. It is also tenant-specific: each organisation can maintain its own documentation that reflects local procedures and naming conventions, rather than relying solely on generic platform documentation.
Key Features#
- Hierarchical category management with parent-child relationships and custom ordering
- Article creation with rich content support (Markdown and HTML)
- Tag-based article organisation for easy discovery across broad topic areas
- Full-text search across article titles and content
- Publish and draft workflow with admin-only create, update, and delete
- Author tracking for all articles
- Category-based article filtering
Use Cases#
- Building an in-application knowledge base with organised categories tailored to local platform procedures and workflows
- Managing help documentation through draft and published states to ensure content is reviewed before users see it
- Enabling users to search for answers across all published articles without leaving the platform
- Organising help content hierarchically by topic and subtopic to support both browsing and targeted search
Industry Context#
Government agencies deploying complex operational platforms to field personnel use in-application help to reduce reliance on external training materials. Law enforcement forces maintain platform-specific procedural guidance inside the system, keeping instructions alongside the workflows they describe. Utility companies onboarding field crews to work order and dispatch systems use embedded help to provide quick reference for common tasks. Financial services firms maintain compliance guidance inside trading and case management platforms to ensure users have context at the point of decision.
Integration#
The Help Center domain integrates with User for author tracking and permissions, and with Organisation for tenant-specific content management. All articles and categories are stored in PostgreSQL with full-text search index support.
Open Standards#
- GraphQL (June 2018 specification): All help centre queries and mutations are exposed through a GraphQL API, allowing clients to request exactly the article and category fields they need in a single typed request.
- CommonMark / Markdown: Article content is authored and stored in Markdown, giving authors a portable, plain-text format for rich documentation that renders consistently across clients.
- ISO 8601: All article and category timestamps (created_at, updated_at) are serialised as ISO 8601 date-time strings, ensuring unambiguous interchange with any consuming client or downstream system.
- RFC 4122 (UUID): Every article and category record is assigned a version-4 UUID as its primary identifier, guaranteeing globally unique, collision-resistant identifiers without centralised coordination.
- ISO/IEC 9075 SQL (PostgreSQL full-text search): Article search uses SQL full-text indexing via tsvector and plainto_tsquery, both of which conform to the ISO/IEC 9075 SQL standard as implemented by PostgreSQL, enabling relevance-ranked keyword search across titles and content.
- OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749): Access to all help centre queries and mutations is gated by the platform's OAuth 2.0 bearer-token authentication layer, with role-based checks ensuring only authenticated administrators can create, update, or delete content.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14