.xpj file gone!!

[rbilleaud]

I tried to go to a Help file I developed a couple of months ago to make some changes and when I opened the folder the .xpj file for that project was gone! All of the other files are there which makes this all the more weird. My question is is there any way to create a new .xpj file and associate the old files with the new .xpj file. I thought about creating the new project file and importing all the old files into the new project, but some files can't be imported like .js and .apj files. I don't want to have to totally recreate this, epecially since everything else is still there.

[RoboColum_n_]

This sounds like you are looking at Webhelp output files not the project source.

[RoboWizard]

Hi there

I tend to agree with Colum. But just in case...

Another thing to check is to ensure you haven't changed the drop-down on the dialog when you open projects. Maybe it got changed somehow so that it isn't "looking" for XPJ files. Assuming the XPJ file is really gone, you might find a ProjectName.HHP. Try opening from that.

Cheers... Rick

[rbilleaud]

I don't see how that would be possible. I never change the output folder when I generate a layout (I guess I should change that practice), I always generate the output files to the same folder as the project itself. I looked for a .hhp file, but no dice. This is really weird. Even if we assumed that I accidentally changed the output folder, I'm looking at the project folder in the RoboHelp project directory. The only possible scenario I could even hypothosize where Colum's theory would be plausible is that somehow the output files overwrote whatever existed in the project folder to begin with - BUT - that still wouldn't explain what happened to the .xpj file because that would not have been overwritten since the output does not contain a .xpj file. The entire folder would have had to be overwritten and I can't see that happening without some sort of warning or prompt that I would be overwriting an existing folder. I'm stumped. Be that as it may, assuming I can't recover the .xpj file that brings me back to the question as to whether or not there is anything I can do short of recreating the project.

[RoboWizard]

Hi there

You said: I always generate the output files to the same folder as the project itself.

I don't believe RoboHelp will allow that. If you generated the output there you would be literally cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

Let's assume you have a folder where you store all your projects. An awesomely nice location would be C:\Projects (Hint Hint)
Inside this folder you would have a different folder for each project. So I'll assume a fictitious name of "MyProject". In this case the folder structure would look like this:
C:\Projects\MyProject

Assuming you let RoboHelp behave as it normally would and you didn't take measures to specifically tell it to generate to a different location, it would create the following folder in this path:
C:\Projects\MyProject\!SSL!\WebHelp

In that mode of operation, your main project files are found at C:\Projects\MyProject while the WebHelp output files are found in a sub folder of that path at C:\Projects\MyProject\!SSL!\WebHelp

Cheers... Rick

[rbilleaud]

Ah, I see. I never really gave any thought to where the output file was generated. So, it's in the !SSL! folder. I've got a lot to learn. I use RoboHelp in a different way than most people in that I don't use it to generate Help files, I use it as an HTML editor, so I don't normally use it as it's supposed to be used. I use a lot of image maps and drop-down navigation in my web pages, so the ease with which such functionality can be incorporated using RoboHelp made it a natural. Based on what you've said, what appears to have happened is that somehow the !SSL! folder became the root folder for the project I was working on and the actually folder that the project was in is gone (although I still can't figure out how what was Architecture\!SSL! became just Architecture). Well, is there any way to use the files I do have to put this back together without redoing the whole thing?

[RoboWizard]

Hi there

Well, if you have no backups I suppose that's the next best thing. While it isn't a "press a button and do it" sort of thing, there are some detailed steps outlining what you need to do to recover. Check the link below for more.

Click here to see the steps

Cheers... Rick

[rbilleaud · Accepted solution]

Thanks, just what I needed.

[RoboColum_n_]

Have you tried doing a search for the projectname.xpj file?

[RoboColum_n_]

One other sure sign that you are looking at the webhelp output is the presence of folders such as whdata, whgdata and whxdata.