Context Help truncated

[_Mattias_]

Hi!

I often have much text in my VI Discription. This text is being truncated at 8000 characters when presented in the Context help window. Is there any way to disable this or at least increase the limited number of characters?

[crelf]

QUOTE (_Mattias_ @ May 9 2008, 07:31 AM)

I often have much text in my VI Discription. This text is being truncated at 8000 characters when presented in the Context help window.

8000 characters is a lot for the context help - I strongly suggest only putting a short overview in the context help. Then you can create a chm with all of the gory details and link to that using the VI Properties > Documentation > Help Tag and Help Path settings. That adds the "Detailed Help" link on the bottom of your context window so users can open the chm file.

PS: you can build chm files using the VISTA HTML Documentation Generator from V I Engineering, Inc.* To get a free trail version, check this out.

* Disclaimer: I work for V I Engineering, Inc I'm actually working on a new release of all the old VISTA reuse tools at the moment (and some new ones too...)

[Aristos Queue]

There's a config token for this. In your config file put:

MaxHelpDescLength=10000

or whatever length you want. This will set the maximum number of characters that will be displayed before truncation in the Context Help. If set to a non-positive number (aka -1), then there will be no max. If set to 50 or less, then 50 will be the max.

Of course, this token won't be set on other machines that you install into. If you're making a built app with Context Help, then you can put this token into your app's custom config file. If this is a toolkit that you're building, your readme file may need to tell your users to add the config token. ... assuming of course that you want a CH that is that long. That is highly unlikely. If you've got that much text, it probably goes in the help for the control/indicator/VI.

[Phillip Brooks]

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ May 9 2008, 10:47 AM)

There's a config token for this. In your config file put:

MaxHelpDescLength=10000

Added to the wiki; see http://wiki.lavag.org/LabVIEW_configuratio...xHelpDescLength

[crelf]

QUOTE (Phillip Brooks @ May 9 2008, 11:18 AM)

Added to the wiki

:thumbup:

[PaulG.]

Another option is to create your vi documentation in Word and save as a web page (.htm file). Then link to it as the Help path under vi properties>documentation. The Detailed help link in the Context help window is a link to the document. Click on the link and the document will come up in your web browser. Since it is now a .htm file I don't think you will run into size restrictions. Also, while the vi is running, this document will come up in the browser when the operator presses the F1 key.

[_Mattias_]

Hi!

Thanx for the answers. Really helpful. Good to know it's a value in the config file for this.

I try this and in the long run I will link to an external fil like .htm. Its a neat solution i think.