Child projects missing from merged help output (RH7)

[Guest]

I set up a merged parent project per Peter Grainge's instructions. While everything seemed to work fine at first, I found that a couple of my child projects stop appearing in the parent project's output after the first time I generate the output. (That is, I added all my child projects to the parent, generated the output, and all child projects were account for. However, when I subsequently generated the output for the parent project, two of ten child projects were missing.)

This has happened to me before (sometimes it doesn't happen after the first generation of content... it may take a few times), and it makes me think that merging projects is extremely unreliable. I see the advantages and want to take a merged project approach, but if it keeps "losing" child projects in the output, it's not worth the effort. I've spent many hours troubleshooting and re-doing projects. If it's something I'm doing, don't know where else to look to correct this issue.

Note that my projects are very small at this point: a parent project consists of two to 10 child projects, with no more than 400 topics in total. I am using RH7 as part of the Technical Communications Suite v1 on a Vista OS. Topics for the child projects are imported from FrameMaker as either books or individual .fm files, as required.

I have done the following:

1. Verified that all child projects are added correctly.

2. Re-read Peter's instructions.

2. Re-built the parent project per Peter's instructions (same issue occurring).

3. Built one of the missing child projects from scratch and then added to the parent project (still not showing up).

Any guidance on how I might address this issue would be greatly appreciated.

[Peter Grainge]

Merging help is far from unreliable. It is well tried and tested by many and has been so for a long time.

You haven't indicated whether you are talking about merged webhelp or merged CHMs. Which is it?

You generate the first time and all the children are there. When you generate again they are missing. You mean somehow the generated output has been deleted?

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[Guest]

Thank you for your response, Peter.

I'm doing merged WebHelp. Yes, I'm missing child projects from the generated output -- not all child projects, just a couple of the child projects -- which is why I'm perplexed. The missing children are still in the parent project TOC and I haven't found any differences between the children that are showing up in the generated output as expected and the children that are not appearing in the output (but maybe I'm missing something). I would think the child projects that are the culprits, but when I deleted one of the problem child projects and then re-created it, it still didn't appear in the output.

My folder system is set up per your instructions, with the parent and projects folders at the same level, and all of the child projects as subfolders of the projects folder, so there is no difference in the child projects in terms of location.

[Peter Grainge]

You are generating each project rather than thinking the generating the master is sufficient?

Do the child projects consist of entirely of FM docs? If so, just for test purposes insert one topic directly into each project to see if anything changes.

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[Guest]

I believe that I found my issue -- my two "problem children" did not have Mark of the Web selected. I started over with a new parent project and added the child projects one at a time. I noticed that the two projects in question didn't have Mark of the Web selected, so I selected it before generating each project. Everything looked great. Then I went back, cleared the Mark of the Web box in one of the child projects, regenerated the project, and - viola! - it was missing in the parent output. Could it really be as small as a checkbox? I can't believe I missed that after all this time.

[Peter Grainge]

Good catch.

Yes quite possible. The easy way to prove it is to clear that box and generate again. View in IE and FF. Likely you will have the problem back in IE but FF will be fine.

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[Guest]

That was it. I cleared the box and regnerated the child project. The child was missing in IE but not in FF. Lesson learned.

Thank you very much for your assistance!