Documentation links on block diagrams to use relative paths or environment variables

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

I know hyperlinks in free labels have been implemented in LabVIEW 2015 and that the idea has been marked as implemented:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Hyperlink-in-Floating-Comments/idi-p/986485

Kudos to that and I love it. 

However, there was another idea:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Documantation-links-on-block-diagrams/idi-p/3104999

that was closed as a duplicate of the hyperlink in free labels, except there is a small difference in the second idea that was not really implemented. The hyperlinks do not let us insert links relative to the project, the poster of the Documentation links on block diagrams even says: "The risk would be moving the document and the link becomes invalid. This risk could be minimized by placing a documentation folder in your labview project." 

So this new idea is to let us either use relative paths on the hyperlinks on the free labels: i.e. file:///C:/ProgramData  or use environment variables such as %userprofile%, %programdata%, etc. For example, file:///%userprofile%/documents. This would make it possible to put links to documents in our machine that will be in a different path than the rest of the team working on the project. The documentation might be relative to the project file, but might not be exactly in the same location in each machine due to differences such as %userprofile% = C:\users\<user name>  where <user name> will be different for each team member. 

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

this came about after reading Steve's post: https://decibel.ni.com/content/blogs/labviewramblings/2015/08/28/historical-perspective

[kegghead]

Documentation is part of the source code in my opinion, so while I like the new labels in practice I haven't found much use for them. Being able to link to relative paths is really what I'd be after.

I'm not so enthusiastic about environment variables. I wouldn't want to assume my source code knows where its going to live on any system. Sometimes I export projects outside of a controlled workspace to explicitly decouple the files from source control. If I used environment variables, I'd be in just as bad a situation had I hard-coded full paths.

[Manzolli]

Liked the idea. It would be nice that the relative link use the owner VI path by default.