I am having some difficulties in deploying the .chm help on a Windows 7 Network where I am not allowed to be an administrator.
On my own machines everything is fine including firing up from the Clarion executable. I use the ABC help templates. On the network, at first we had the usual blank right-hand pane effect with the .chm file itself. The network administrators at the site eventually found two registry settings which allowed the pane to first display text and then pictures. So the file itself now works fine too. However we still have the blank pane when calling it from the program.
I use a single executable for this program and the templates normally wrap everything required. I did try testing if CWHHla.dll had to be present, even though it did not show in the map file, but this makes no difference.
I sort of suspect we need more registry settings to allow launching from a program but is there anyone in the hub who deploys chm help and knows? Do I need to do something more on the Clarion side?
I made an installation on the local D: drive on one of the network machines and all worked perfectly. That confirmed it is only when assessing over the network, so not a problem on the Clarion side.
Hopefully there is someone else in the community that also deploys chm help with their programs and knows the settings to enable the detail pane when called via the Clarion program over a network.
There is a registry setting to enable network CHM files. However, this is not a recommended practice because it enables all CHM files to be opened. So you would be making a change to your users system that, in theory, makes it less secure.
What I do is copy the CHM file from the network path to the user’s temp folder when the application starts up. Check to see if the network file is newer and update it as needed. Then set the help file for your program to the file in the temp folder.
That’s a clever idea and I will keep it in reserve. I take your point about security, after all that is why they no longer show by default,
There are other client-server applications on the network using chm help, I assumed using server copies, rather than local ones. Unfortunately I have no acess to see what the local C: drives have and won’t be granted any, even for a single machine. That policy makes working with them very difficult. Nobody in the current network team seems to remember how it was done for the other applications and now they are researching it at my request, I feel sort of obliged to carry on down that route, at least for the moment.
your suggestion is a good one though, so if they fail I will gratefully take it up.
I don’t know if there is a way to allow a specific CHM to display over the network. I don’t recall being able to find one. But it was well over 10 years ago I looked at this.
Here is the registry setting I used many years ago to allow any network CHM to display.
Perhaps passing this onto the group will help them recall what they did before.
Many thanks, this is really helpful. On Monday I will check to see where the other chm files are installed.As I said I assumed the server but they may have made copies on all the clients that will use the program. If that’s the case I will take up your self-checking idea.
The other part of this security-wise is that html help out of the box allows right click, which lets you open a browser, a cmd prompt, run any exe, etc because you can get a file dialog. There are registry settings to disable right click / view source, which are the entry points to this issue.