Hi All,
I am finding a strange problem with the integration of help collection.
In our case, help is installed using a VS setup program. This msi is being installed silently as part of another msi install.
The help is registered correctly. The help collection is listed in the filter combobox for help-index, contents and search.
But, say in contents, no contents from the help is listed. similarly for index, no entries from our help collection are listed. Search also doesn't work.
I can get this working by removing our collection from VSCC and adding this again, I have to close and reopen IDE between and after these steps.
Any idea how to resolve this so that the help collection works after install without any further steps or after adding this to VSCC if it is not added(The problem here is this collection is selected by default after install in VSCC, but the help contents window shows no TOC for the collection).
Thanks,
Sajith
Help not listed in TOC after install
Peter Morgenthaler
Hi sajithpt,
Recently I've been involved in a similar problem which was solved by using Microsoft Help MVP Rob Chandler's (creator of Helpware FAR) H2Reg tool:
http://helpware.net/mshelp2/h2reg.htm
This tool will enable you to register a Help2 Collection with various versions of Microsoft Visual Studio. Please have a good look at the documentation explaining what this tool does. It might help get the job done.
frank
Ming Gao
Hello Sajith,
After your collection is registered via the .msi, there is also a merge custom action that gets run in order to get all of that working correctly. It sounds as if the custom action is possibly not getting run.
A way to test this is to do your installation, and then try opening help from the VS IDE - if the merge did not happen correctly, you will not see your content. You could then try the following:
1) close any instances VS and DExplore
2) launch VS help from the Start menu shortcut here:
All Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Documentation
Launching from the command line behaves a little differently in that if the help system determines a merge is needed, it will perform it. Launching from the IDE will not do this check for performance reasons.
The CynicalDoctor
Hi Paul,
Thanks very much for the reply.
Still I couldn't get this working. But I have some more inputs-
Our help collection we had prepared for VS 7.0 and is being plugged into MS.VSCC namespace. In this case it works for VS7.0, 7.1 and 8.0. So I have not changed this yet. Also I want to use the same hxs file and the same setup program for all three VS versions. Can this be the problem If so, can we plugin this help to MS.VSCC, MS.VSCC.2003 and MS.VSIPCC.v80 namespaces using the same setup program (I am planning to add different "MSHelp2_RegTables__RTL_---_---.msm" for these versions in the same setup program). I tried this, but it doesn't work.
In this case, should I add different custom actions to "VSCC_Collection_Files_RTL_---_enu.msm" to do merge for different VS versions
Thanks,
Sajith
Guto
Hello Paul,
You said-
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After your collection is registered via the .msi, there is also a merge custom action that gets run in order to get all of that working correctly. It sounds as if the custom action is possibly not getting run.
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How to make this merge custom action run explicitly from the setup program
Thanks,
Sajith