Xcode 9 - Can't Update Help Book

I had a similar problem in that my app stopped showing the latest help contents after I updated them. Other posts suggested that the problem lay with the library Cache and that deleting com.apple.helpd and com.apple.helpviewer would solve the problem. It did until just last week when the problem came back. I did a search for the bundle identifier and found it in com.apple.parsecd as well. Deleting that fixed the problem

This is happening again with XCode 13.4.1. I have changed the text in my Help Book using the editor in XCode. After clearing the caches, the build folder and jumping through all of the other firey hoops mentioned in this thread it is still building the App with a cached version of the Help Book, so I can't update it. As you can see from this post's history this wound has been festering for at least FOUR YEARS. Does anyone have any ideas of how to fix this?

I filed a bug report with apple. They replied that none of those methods for clearing the old help book will work. HV cached are stored in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.held. The correct way to clear the cached Help Books is to use the terminal command hiutil -P ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.held. Be sure to delete other versions of the app because the OS might index versions in /Applications and ~/Applications. Interestingly man hiutil in the terminal doesn't list the P flag but it does seem to exist because the command hiutil -P ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.held does seem to delete the cached version of the Help Book.

I worked on my Application. I did NOTHING to change the Help Book except change one small bit of text. I did everything listed in this thread:

1. I deleted the existing version in the Applications folder.
2. I cleared the Help data bases with hiutil -P ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.help.d.

I have done this many times before but now with MacOS Sonoma 14.0 I get errors:

Received termination response from helpd HPDHelpDataIsTerminating: Shutdown request successfully sent to helpd Unable to clear caches at path: /Users/myname/Library/Containers/com.apple.helpviewer Error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=513 "“Help Viewer” couldn’t be removed because you don’t have permission to access it." UserInfo={NSUserStringVariant=(Remove), NSFilePath=/Users/myName/Library/Containers/com.apple.helpviewer, NSUnderlyingError=0x600000d90d80 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted"}} Caches not cleared: There was a problem clearing Help Viewer and helpd cache files, see logs for details

There is nothing relevant in the logs. The Help Book is properly registered in the .plist as it has been for years. When my Application calls showHelp the help window appears with no content but if I search for terms in the Help Book they appear in the Show all Help Topics with the name of the section they are in but clicking on them leads to a page with the warning "The Selected Content is not Available". Is this some new bug for help editing?

Also trying to force the Application to load the Help Book with stuff like [[NSHelpManager sharedHelpManager] registerBooksInBundle: [NSBundle mainBundle]]; does nothing.

XCode isn't logging Entering AHSRegistered Help Book as it should either.

It's pretty weird that my Help Book has worked for a long time now but suddenly stopped after I upgraded to XCode 15.0.1. The .plists are all correct and not changed. The Help Book is correctly registered. You have to wonder why this would suddenly fail. Help Viewer is not currently being supported by Apple and the documentation is TEN YEARS OLD. At this point it would be easier to write my own help viewer. My help files are just html files anyway. Perhaps there is some documentation describing how to display them in an NSWindow with an NSScrollingTextView. It has to be easier than dealing with the agonizing nightmare of AHRegistered help books.

After going over everything over and over I was able to get it to work. The only difference between this and other attempts was that I deleted the old version of the application with Launchpad, not by dragging it to the trash. This may make a difference as far as deleting the caches goes.

Apple Help is a really useful feature. It goes with your application so it's there even if your user is in a remote location with no internet. BUT the implementation is pretty flakey. I'm going to replace it with an NSDocument to make it easier to program and maintain.

I found out that after you delete any other copies of the application and clear the help caches with hiutil -P ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.helpd the help book still won't appear in your app when running it in your development environment with Xcode. BUT if you archive your application and then distribute it, for example as a copy to your applications folder it will.