"Control Online Help" broken on Mac??

[Keller]

Can someone confirm that "Control Online Help" actually works in Mac LabVIEW 2013? I haven't been able to get it to do anything useful:

• If I feed it a known-good .chm file, I get an error code 53, "Manager call not supported" – and what exactly is that supposed to mean?? The description of the "Control Online Help" function certainly implies it should be able to handle a .chm file: "(Mac OS X and Linux) If this input contains a path to a .chm file...".
• If I input the path to a .html file, it opens that file in my browser. Which is totally worthless; if I wanted to do that, I'd use the "Open URL.." function.

Incidentally, adding a .chm or .html file to the "Help path" of the VI Documentation doesn't seem to work either: when I click on the "Detailed help" link, nothing happens.

Furthermore, using .chm files on Mac bothers me. Why not use the native .help bundles, also HTML based? But I guess I can let that one slide, if just I can get something to work...

So am I misunderstanding the documentation (which, in my defense, is not the best example of clear expository writing), or is something busted? Thanks in advance.

-- Philip

[johnsold]

Phillip,

Where do you find "Control Online Help"? I have been using LV on the Mac since version 1 but am unfamiliar with that term. (OK. I found the function.)

I get the same error and am as confused as you about what it means.

I have been using CHM Reader.app to look at .chm files. Of course this is not linked to LV but it does work with NI .chm files.  I have also tried iCHM but found it less satisfactory. CHM Reader and several others are available through the Apple App Store.

I have not tried to create a detailed help file on the Mac, so I cannot offer you a solution.

Lynn

[Keller]

Lynn,

Thanks for confirming that it's not just me or my machine. In the meantime, I've confirmed that everything works swimmingly under Windows. Also, working on the hypothesis that "Manager call not supported" might mean that some OS functionality has disappeared, I went rummaging in my archives to install LabVIEW 8.6.1 on MacOS 10.4 (Tiger). I get the same error; so if something's broken, it's been broken a looong time (LV 8.6.1 dates from 12.2008). I will file a support request to force an official response from NI.

Thanks for the referral to CHM Reader; I have been using iCHM. And it's good to meet another LV 1.0 veteran; as far as I can figure, I started using LabVIEW in 1988 or 1989, when Mac was the top-priority platform - in fact, the only platform!

-- Phil

[Keller · Accepted solution]

I think I finally understood the help for the "Control Online Help" function. On Mac/Linux, what they expect you to do is to organize all your HTML files into directories named "<application>/help/html/xxx.chm" (LabVIEW's own help is organized this way, which is how I figured it out). Then you place the path to a "xxx.chm" directory in the "Path to the help file" input, the name of an HTML file in the "String to search for" input, and the function will, as advertised, open that HTML file in the browser. See attached screen-shot. 

I'm enlightened but disappointed. All it amounts to is concatenating the file name onto the directory path and sending that to the browser, all of which can easily be done with the "Open URL in default browser" function. Whether the "Operation" is set to "Contents" or "Key" seems to make no difference whatsoever. And the error 53 is completely meaningless. Oh well.

[johnsold]

Thanks for reporting what you figured out.

Lynn