"Call Parent Method" not really consistent

[AristosQueue (NI)]

We have vascillated back and forth about how much of this detail belongs in the documentation directly. In my experience, most people never read the help. Those that get confused enough about a node turn to the help as a last resort, and they consider the length of the help topic for a function be scaled to the node's complexity -- large amount of help implies a node that they need to shy away from unless they have time to study it. For a node that is so fundamental to OO programming, that kind of implies that it needs to be short and to the point.

Saying "This node invokes the parent VI" says just that -- it is a call to the VI. It doesn't claim to make any changes to how that parent VI behaves when it is called. Someone might read more into that, as you did. Do we add more text there to untangle those who are surprised? I'm not sure... you obviously figured out what the node did. You were surprised that it did what it did, but if the point of the help is to describe the "what", then it did its job. You went on to question "why". We don't usually include the whys in the online help. That's usually in white papers and forum posts.

Should we be including more "why" in the online help? As I say, we've gone back and forth on that. You'll find help topics where the why is delved into quite deeply, generally as a result of many customers being totally confused. I can't cite examples off the top of my head, but I recall a tech writer saying a few years ago that such entries usually occur when

• feature A is totally intuitive to a user, and
• feature B is totally intuitive,
• but when A meets B, there's a logical result that C must work in a particular way, but C, considered on its own, is counterintuitive.

Going into a lot of detail about how C++ works or which other language our feature is most similar to is not useful to most users, in my experience, so adding that to the help would just increase the language localization burden of our documentation team without a lot of user benefit. At least, that's my personal evaluation. I have to balance that against the knowledge that had you posted your questions in Chinese or Korean, I never would've seen the post and never could've answered you. No one localizes the fourm posts.