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Friday, March 12, 2010

Adding Help Files and References to RAS

Written by Chris Goodell, P.E., D. WRE | WEST Consultants
Copyright © RASModel.com. 2010. All rights reserved.

Everyone has their favorite references that they go to for help and guidance when developing hydraulic models. It could be the n-value table in Chow, or Tony Wahl’s Breach Parameter paper, or simply specific exerts in the RAS manuals. Whatever your preference, HEC has provided a very convenient way to easily access reference documents while in the HEC-RAS environment. You simply copy the document and paste it into the \Program Files\HEC-RAS\4.1.0 folder. You have to change the name so that the file begins with “RasHelp_”. That is how RAS recognizes it as a help document. Then when you open RAS, under the Help menu, you’ll see your custom documents listed for easy access. Notice that I have Appendix B of the RAS Hydraulic Reference Manual, a summary of Breach Parameter equations, and a Sediment Gradation Table in the Help menu.

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2 comments:

  1. Great tip! I used to have a file explorer window open with links to the reference manuals, but this makes things easier and avoids clogging up the taskbar.

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  2. Thanks for sharing this tip.

    As an alternate approach you could include shortcuts to your favorite supporting manuals in this location with the "RasHelp_" prefix added to the beginning of the PDF file(s) shortcut name. These files will load up just the same.

    The only visual difference appears in the Help menu itself, RAS will add a note on the end as "-Shortcut", which has no affect on the performance. This minimizes local hard drive clutter and allows network users to access existing files rather than recopy them.

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