RH7 Crashes When Adding/Renaming Folders

[Guest]

I am using RH 7.02.001 on WinXP (via the TCS, if that is relevant).

I think what I'm looking for is some perspective on migrating a single project to a collection of merged projects.

I have a fairly large HTML project (1500 topics in 100 or so folders, 2000 images) which I've been working with since 2003 in various versions of RH. I use conditional build tags quite a bit, and output WebHelp (primary) and a number of Printed Documentation builds.

The project has grown a bit since inception, but not by much.  It is mostly in maintenance mode.

It has generally been fairly easy to work with over the years, but in the past few months, it has started to crash every time I try to create a new folder or rename a folder via the Project Manager.

I have rebuilt the .cpd file, but that has not helped.  The fact that this project behaved itself up until recently makes me wonder where the problem lies.

I think I'm at the point where I have to decide whether to split the project up and used a merged approach, or whether upgrading to RH8 (or the next patch level of RH7) will solve this problem. Or adding RAM.

I'd rather not convert this to a merged solution for several reasons:

- the TOC structure will have to be re-evaluated

- broken links will need to be repaired

- conditional builds, SSLs, etc., will need to be addressed

- will the new structure play nicely with Subversion?

- having 1 project makes it easier to apply certain global changes more quickly (e.g. changing headers/footers via a single .htt, applying a CSS change)

- need to train the team on working with the merged approach

I do recognize that the merged solution may have benefits that justify the migration cost, but beyond the obvious one of "smaller projects are easier to work with and don't crash", I'm not sure what they are.

I guess my questions are:

- Is relief available that will enable me to stick with the single project?

- Are there other pitfalls to a merged project migration?

- Are there other benefits of such a migration?

Thanks,

Dave

[Peter Grainge]

The number of topics is not enough to justify the work in splitting it up into a merged setup but the number of images might be an issue. A while back I had someone having severe problems albeit with over three times the number of images and merging did resolve that.

I wonder though in your case if the number of folders is an issue. I have not worked with that number although using many more topics.

FIrst though do some searching. Something is telling me that whilst not common, this has been reported before. I am assuming you project is not on a network. If it is, move it locally and then see how it goes.

Another possibility is folder and path names that are very long.

If anyone else is using a large number of folders like that without trouble, it would help to know. Please join the thread if that is the case.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply.  I did some searching in the forum and did not find anything that matched my problem, but I'm going to do a bit more digging as I agree that it seems likely to have been raised before (I'm still learning how to search the "new" forums too).

My project is on my local hard drive, and I don't think the folder names are too long.  The longest folder name is 26 chars, but most are in the range of 10-15.  Almost all folders are at the root level. I do have some subfolders, but none are more than 1 level deep.

I've spent some time streamlining the project by consolidating some folders and shortening some of the longer folder names. It's a little painful. Each time I try to rename a folder, the project crashes. When I reopen, the new folder is there alongside the old folder, but the topics are still all in the old folder and must be moved over individually. Most of my topic names are of reasonable length (at least in my opinion), but I can shorten some.

I'm going to try to eliminate some build tags, builds and alternate TOC's as well.

I would like to reduce the number of images.  That will take require more effort though.

I'd be curious to hear about folder count in larger projects though. I've seen postings reporting projects with 10000+ topics.  I wonder how many folders these projects use?

Dave

[Guest]

One possible cause here is having too many levels of sub folders under the project. Ideally you shouldn't have more than one level of sub folders under your project as having too long a path can cause crashes. IF you find this is the problem and you need to de-layer a bit, start by promoting the lowest level first. Before you start backup everything and then save frequently in case of fruther crashes so progress is not lost...

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Author care wrote:

One possible cause here is having too many levels of sub folders under the project. Ideally you shouldn't have more than one level of sub folders under your project as having too long a path can cause crashes....

While I generally agree that you don't want super long path names, I've never heard of anyone recommending only a single level of folders. I used to have lots of nested folders and didn't have issues.

For example, my structure was as follows:

Hardware

>> Printers

>>>> Texas Instruments

>>>>>> 885

>>>>>>>> Procedures

>>>>>>>> Common Issues

>>>>>>>> Images

>>>>>>>> Configuration

>>>>>>>> Reference

>>>>>> 895

>>>>>> DMD2000

>>>> IBM

>>>> Genicom

>> PCs

>> Multiplexers

Software

Policies

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 within the day - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Guest]

Whilst it's true you can get away with more than one level, I was recently tasked with converting a document with too many sub levels into RH8 and it crashed frequently until we de-layered it. What I'm really saying here is keep things as simple as possible and minimise the number of sub folder levels, ideally no more than one.

In fact the problem was too long a path in the example I was dealing with so it was a mix of number of folder levels and folder names...

[Guest]

Well, after spending several hours performing various housekeeping tasks (deleting files listed on RH's unused file report, consolidating folders, removing old conditional build tags, etc.), my project was still crashing when I tried to rename or create a new folder.

Then I tried deleting both the .cpd and the .xpj and reopening via the .hhp.  This method was successful.

Note that this approach required me to re-create my conditional build tags (the topics are still tagged correctly, I just needed to re-create the actual tags with the same names).

One more caveat:  if you need to do this, be sure that your .hhp file is up to date (generate a CHM or another layout to rebuild it).

Everything seems to be working....I was forced to perform some unscheduled cleanup of my project, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Dave

[Peter Grainge]

See the topic Opening Projects on my site. Renaming the CPD and deleting it later is fine. The XPJ should only be deleted in rare circumstances and is generally unnecessary. If you don't delete the XPJ, CBTs and many other things come back from other internal files. Delete the XPJ and you have to recreate things like that, the layouts and so on, manually.

---

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