LabVIEW Help Menu Explained - Link to PDF, HTML, etc.

[RDR]

After reviewing the VI Description or Context Help for a VI, my next stop for documentation is often a detailed help document linked to from the LabVIEW > Help menu.  I've found this is an often overlooked feature for LabVIEW Add-ons, and with this post I hope to clear up a few misconceptions and unknowns about integrating into the Help menu.

To start out, let me first point out there is an article describing how to integrate into the LabVIEW menus on the ADC here: Integrating into the LabVIEW Menus

Supported Filetypes

There are a few natively supported filetypes for the LabVIEW Help menu, meaning LabVIEW will auto-populate the Help menu with these items if they're located in LabVIEW\Help:

• .chm - Microsoft Compiled HTML Help
• .hlp - Windows Help File (Windows 7 no longer ships with the program to open these files, WinHlp32.exe, but it can be obtained from Microsoft here)
• .vi - a LabVIEW VI!

**Note: Inserting an underscore in front of a filename will result in LabVIEW ignoring the file (ex: _filename.chm).

If you follow the rules above, adding a file to LabVIEW\help folder and restarting LabVIEW will result in a new Help menu entry:

Now for a few tips on naming:

• For any menu item, you can create a .txt file with a name identical to one of the files in LabVIEW\help and in the first line of the .txt enter whatever menu entry text you want to display in the LabVIEW > Help menu followed by the file extension of the help document you wish to rename.  For example, for ProductName.vi if I were to create a ProductName.txt and for the first line in the .txt file enter 'This is text.vi', I would see this upon restarting LabVIEW:
  
• If you're adding a LabVIEW VI as a menu entry, the Window Title is displayed in the Help menu unless you choose to rename the entry using a .txt file as discussed above.

Why Would I Add a VI to the Help Menu?

VIs can be used to load filetypes other than .hlp and .chm from the LabVIEW > Help menu.  There is an LLB located in the vi.lib\platform\browser.llb folder containing utility VIs for loading PDF, HTML, and other files on disk; you can find the LLB under vi.lib\platform\browser.llb.  I've attached an example below to demonstrate how to open a PDF document from the Help menu.

How Do I Create a Sub-Menu?

The Integrating into the LabVIEW Menus document discusses how to add sub-menus and organize their contents.  This can be useful in the Help menu when you have a handful of help documents and would like to group them in a sub-menu for your Company or Product.