TM1 Forum

It appears that yet another new Help system has been inflicted on us somewhere in 9.4. I'm pretty sure it wasn't in 9.4.0 (which I had on a test platform before upgrading last week, and I'm sure it wasn't present in that version), but am not sure whether it came in with 9.4.1 or 9.4.1 FP1.
Who on EARTH could have thought that this was an enhancement? It's basically a searchable version of all of the .pdfs that come with the installation package. Hello? We HAVE the .pdfs, if that was what we wanted we could search them in Acrobat Reader and more importantly we could search the whole lot of them in one hit via a Full Reader Search.

You can't do that with the "new and improved" help file though, neo-ho-hooo! You have to pick one of the volumes. Each of which will open on a separate tab in your browser. (One change, though; when I launched Help in 9.4.0 it always launched in IE (actually it launched TWO IE windows) even though Firefox was my default browser. I didn't really care about that. The new one launches in your default browser.)

Lemmie see whether I can remember now, the syntax for installing a service, is that in theeee... Developer Guide? Nope. Hmmm, the User Guide (given that there's a lot of content in there that's not really end user content)... nope. The Reference Guide? Nope. The Operations Guide? Ah, bingo.

OK, slight exaggeration, the Operations Guide was the second one that I checked in this case. But what if it's something that's less well remembered? You recall a word, a part of a syntax, a piece of functionality? At one time you could search the WHOLE of the help documentation. Now you get to do up to 7 separate searches, or reach for the Acrobat search.

On the plus side someone screwed up the indexing in the Reference Guide and all of the TM1 TurboIntegrator functions can be seen under a single heading (the way you can with the "old fashioned but works better" 8.2.12 file) without having to work out which grouping the command you're looking for might fall under in Iboglix's opinion. None of us at my site cared for the "many sub-books" change in the 9.1 help file, since with the older one we could just skim through the list until we had that "a-ha!" moment. It looks like they intended to retain the groupings, but someone screwed up and the grouping headings are at the same level as the main items.

May there be many more such beneficial screwups.

Either that or an "Expand All Elements" option for the help file to save us from needing to click open every category.

Think its a part of 9.4MR1.

Quite a few 'suprises' if you ask me. Some of the TM1 silent install/uninstall switches have changed - all of which remain undocumented. Spent some time 'guessing' what some of the switches to include/exlcude particular components were.

The Muppet of the Week award hasn't been claimed for a while, today it goes to whichever person thought that was a good idea.

Is this the only help system? E.g. if you go to the help menu in TI do you still get this setup, or do you get the searchable help system?

Martin

If you are in TI it will take you directly to the TI guide. I have found the new system to be a pain since if what you were looking for was in the developer guide and not the user guide it was not included in your search.

I dont know if you have noticed, but they have also taken this approach on the IBM site also. I had to search for a good while to fnd the PDFs of the docs everything is in this new web page format and I have found the searching to be hit or miss.

But on the bright side after multiple releases since its introduction the .NET API docs are as stellar as ever.

Martin Ryan wrote:The Muppet of the Week award hasn't been claimed for a while, today it goes to whichever person thought that was a good idea.

More of a muppet than I originally thought. As it turns out if you're using Excel 2007, you don't even get the fly out menu. If you launch the Help from the main Excel ribbon, you get the Users Guide. No option to choose one of the others, and no way to move to them once the Users Guide opens.

Yay for progress.

In even more help fun, I needed to look up a TI Function this morning so I expanded out the "TM1 TurboIntegrator Functions" but to my suprise there is only one child for this section, "ASCII and Text Turbo Integrator Functions". Looking to the right I see all the usual sections displayed so I decided to expand the Ascii functions and there are all the TI functions and the headers I expected, but they are all low level nodes, no hierarchy and all under the ASCII header.

I know they want you to use the Wizard, but this seems like an important section to let something that big slide.

George Regateiro wrote:In even more help fun, I needed to look up a TI Function this morning so I expanded out the "TM1 TurboIntegrator Functions" but to my suprise there is only one child for this section, "ASCII and Text Turbo Integrator Functions". Looking to the right I see all the usual sections displayed so I decided to expand the Ascii functions and there are all the TI functions and the headers I expected, but they are all low level nodes, no hierarchy and all under the ASCII header.

I know they want you to use the Wizard, but this seems like an important section to let something that big slide.

No, that was the GOOD bug that I mentioned in the first post. Having everything under ASCII and Text was indeed a stuff-up, but at least it returns us to the good old days of the 8.2.12 help file where you could just scan down the complete list of functions until your memory catches on the one that you're looking for. It's better than having to flip open 13 category "books" to get to see the whole list as you did in 9.1.

Though having said that, there IS one improvement in that part of the 9.4 documentation; they do list all of the functions on a single page so you CAN skim the list until you find the name that you recall and then jump straight to it from that page. This is something that didn't exist in the 9.1 help file. In that one, you really did need to flip open as many of the "books" in the Contents pane as it took to find the function that you half-remembered.

Even so, I don't mind that they haven't done the groupings correctly, as a result of which I can see all of the functions in the Contents pane with a single click.

Alan, Does this mean you have successfully upgraded to 9.1MR1?

Adam Buckle wrote:Alan, Does this mean you have successfully upgraded to 9.1MR1?

Hey Adam, missed you at Cognos UG the other week!

No, only on one test platform to try to identify its strengths and weaknesses for the future. There's no way on the gods' little green Earth I'd risk deploying 9.4 operationally at this stage.

I'm seeing whether I can scrape together the funds (for both server and software) to go 64 bit because I think we're going to hit trouble once we pass the 9.1 "models may use more memory" barrier if we stay on 32 bit. In the meantime I'm thinking of going to 9.0, though I have to check out the reported issue about temporary views corrupting since a lot of our TIs are dependent on those.

Because of the memory issue I can't see either 9.1 or 9.4 in our operational future (outside of possibly as a Web server) while we're still on 32 bit unless we fall so far behind the curve that we have no choice. And even then my suspicion (given the timeframes involved) is that it won't be 9.4 as such anyway, but rather whatever follows it.