Summary of the problem
When a user clicks the Help button on a built‑in (system) geoprocessing tool, ArcGIS Pro opens the tool's Esri‑hosted documentation page on the web (per the Help Source setting). Custom tools do not have this option. For a custom tool — including script tools and Python toolboxes (.pyt) — the Help button instead renders the tool's local metadata into a temporary HTML file using Pro's built‑in stylesheet, and opens that.
As a third‑party tool developer, I maintain my own richly formatted, illustrated help pages on my website. There is currently no supported way to make the tool's Help button open those pages. My users only ever see the auto‑generated metadata page, which cannot be styled, branded, or linked to my documentation site.
Current behavior
- System tool → Help button → registered Esri documentation URL (online).
- Custom .pyt/script tool → Help button → locally generated metadata HTML (temp file), with no property to point elsewhere.
Requested enhancement
Expose a way to register a custom Help URL per tool (and optionally per toolbox), so that clicking Help opens that URL in the browser instead of the generated metadata page — exactly as system tools already do with their Esri URLs.
Ideally this would be settable through the same channels developers already use:
- a property on the Python toolbox tool class (e.g., self.helpURL), and/or
- a field in the tool's metadata / tool properties dialog ("External help URL"), and/or
- an element in the tool metadata XML (.pyt.xml) support files.
Suggested behavior: if a custom Help URL is present, the Help button opens it; if it is absent, Pro falls back to today's metadata rendering (fully backward compatible).
Why it matters
Third‑party and organizational tool authors invest heavily in professional documentation but currently cannot connect it to the in‑product Help button. This change would let custom tools deliver the same first‑class, branded help experience as Esri's own tools, improve the end‑user experience, and give organizations a single authoritative documentation source for their custom toolsets.
