Broken links in Robohelp 8 - Right click restore action on broken links does not work

[C_Kerr]

Hi,

The issue began when I checked in my Robohelp 8 project to TFS earlier. I checked in the whole project, which perhaps wasn't wise, as I had only changed two files. For whatever reason this seemed to confuse Robohelp, and it started prompting me to delete files from TFS. I have since removed the project from source control, but the project is corrupted. Following closing and reopening it, a large number of the project folders are missing from the Project Manager, and there are dozens of files in the Broken links list.

I tried following the advice on fixing broken links on Peter Grainge's site  (http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/opening/opening_projects.htm) but I'm stuck. Robohelp is in such a state that when I right click on a broken link and click Restore, nothing happens (no explorer opens to allow me to locate the files). Additionally, for a large number of the broken links, the 'Restore' option is greyed out in the right click menu. I noticed that all of the broken links in the latter category have '#' in their name.

There's some other strange behaviour. Whenever I open a project, the cursor oscillates rapidly from a pointer to a busy icon. I know this is one of the symptoms of the bug that can occur when the 8.01 and 8.02 patches are not installed, but both patches have been installed on my machine.

Other info: I have tried deleting the cpd file. All files are present on my C drive, but they are not displaying in Robohelp (as I said). I have a fairly recent zip backup of the project.

For the purposes of this question, I am more interested in the broken links issue than the version control problem, but I am also keen to prevent this from happening again.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! At the moment all I can think to do is to uninstall and reinstall Robohelp.

Many thanks,

Chris

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

Hi Chris,

If the file name has # it probably would mean the bookmarks are broken from your project.

Can you try "Check out All", and then try restoring the broken links from -- Tools -- Resolve Broken Links.

Do you have a local copy of the project with you that you can check with?

Can you try replairing broken links from this article?

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/RoboHelp/8.0/RoboHTML/WSB3209593-870C-43e4-B241-2F7BA9533F86.html#WS5b3c...

Thanks,

Anjaneai

[C_Kerr]

Hi Anjaneai,

Thank you for your prompt reply.

What exactly do you mean by restore the broken links? When I open Tools and Resolve Broken links then click Restore, I get the following message:

'You cannot restore a topic that would be outside the project folder. Please make sure the references are to the project folder then try restoring the topics.'

I cannot locate the topics in Robohelp in order to link to them. As far as I can see, the only way to fix the broken links would be to manually create new topics and repopulate them with content. I would have to do this for hundreds of topics. Is there any alternative?

Also, what might have caused this problem, and what can I do to make sure this doesn't happen again?

All the files are intact on the server, and on my C drive. But I cannot locate the missing topics in Robohelp.

I would really appreciate any further help you or anyone else has to offer.

Thanks,

Chris

[C_Kerr]

Another point:

Before this happened, Robohelp had been occasionally trying to check files into source control almost at random, with "lock, edit" as the reason. These were files that had not been worked on at all. No changes had been made to them. Whenever I agreed to check the files in, they would be undone by the server. I don't know if this is related to what went wrong after that, but I suspect it is.

Chris