Offline Documentation and Help

[PicoPuls]

All my development takes place offline
and I have been reading on different places that FlowCode7 has offline help files.
Where does it hide ? I can't find it

From my perspective it would be great to have them as .chm files
because they are so fast. PDF is generally a pain for help resources.

Best regards
Bengt

[EtsDriver]

Almost same seems that all the component helps have wrong component id's when we press the help button? Atleast the ModbusMaster help doesnt work, neither the CAN or DSP system help... The help needs some work?

[Benj]

Offline help is coming soon.

As for the component help links from within Flowcode, I am able to replicate the issue so I am investigating this now. Looks like the URL we are generating is a little off so this is being fixed now.

[DavidA]

Hello,

You can download the offline wiki here:

http://www.matrixtsl.com/resources/file ... ort_v1.zip

[PicoPuls]

In August
in this very post
it was discussed that Flowcode7 will offer offline help.
I can't find it yet but I would welcome an offline solution indeed.

I would especially look forward to the speed of an offline .chm file
It is only one file rather than ten-thousands of htm-files

The htm system that Matrix has offered in this post
v7_wiki_export_v1.zip is 674 MB and 30+30= 60,000 files

A chm with the same info will be one single file,
with the size of 50 MB (Guess)

Tools like Help&Manual can transform a html structure into a chm
more or less automatically but the html should be created in the same tool.
Otherwise it will not look quite professional,

For this reason it is very much job for each Flowcode customer to create their own
.chm from the present web structure.

For Matrix it would be easy to handle one html structure and one .chm
from the same source.
In addition, ebook.exe and pdf can also be created automatically from the same source.

It will probably speed up the development for every Flowcode customer
to access help in less than a second.

Matrix has already a chm help for PPPv3
and the competition Microe and CCS have excellent chm offline help

The best pic compiler worldwide (Fc7 !) deserves the best help system

Best regards
BO

[Benj]

Thanks for your post.

We used to create our help in a CHM format using a special tool. However this quickly became buggy and hard to maintain. Due to these problems it was hard to update our help files and this caused problems for our users not being able to get the help they needed easily.

We now use an online system using a very popular social documentation platform which makes it very easy for us (and anyone else with permissions) to automatically document all of our components and also jump in whenever we have a free minute and do some mods to the help. No special software required. e.g. If I'm bored or come across an undocumented issue I can go in and do edits on my phone or tablet. It's also great because we can put all the examples and other resource files right in with the help, something you cant do with a CHM without lots of man effort uploading and manually linking files.

We've worked hard to allow this online system to be available offline as we know this is important to some users. We tried many options and trust me it's harder to do than it first seems.

The cost is the rather large file size, However it's not so big that it wouldn't for example fit onto a CD-ROM and modern HDDs are both massive and low cost. Maybe there is a way we can add compression to help reduce the file size. We could also maybe pour the absolute basics into a CHM that you get with Flowcode by default?

I hope this helps to clear things up and explain why we currently do things the way we do. I agree that a well bookmarked pdf would be ideal so we will keep investigating and try to make this better for users.

[Lagoda]

Hello,

Maybe I just do not know, but how have to set the acces path for the offline installed WIKI Help, in an offline installed Flowcode 7.
Because the Flowcode always searching it on the Internet, and I can't find, where have to set up the acces path.
Can someone help me on this?

Best Regards,

Lagoda

[Lagoda]

Well, after I read posts on this topic sadly I conclude that there is no such possibility.

If I understand correctly, it's harder to do than we think.

If someone have some idea of ​​DIY, as long as the factory ready solution, please share it with me.

Lagoda