RHX5 - The default topic displays in the ToC and content panes

[saiceav]

A colleague had a curious problem recently. When you open the Start Page of her RH project, you get the traditional tri-pane. The ToC is on the left and the content (Default Topic) on the right. Clicking the first book in her TOC displays the Default Topic in the left (ToC) pane, so you view the Default Topic in the left and right panes.

Any idea what the problem is?

More details:

• Created and compiled in RH X5.
• There's a Start Page (e.g., abc.htm) and a Default Topic (xyz.htm). The Default Topic, when generating the project, is xyz.htm. The TOC starts with a book (let's say the title is AAA) with a link to xyz.htm. There are several other books (Getting Started, etc.) under this first AAA book. I realize it's unusual to have a book first, and not a page, but that's what she had.
• Ran the help on IE 7.0 on a WinXP Pro 32-bit system.
• 508 Compliant Output was not checked when generating Webhelp.
• There were no Start-specific scripts in her non-Start topics.
• The colleague did not edit her output files.
• The project was created, from scratch, in RHX5. She did not recreate it using the output files.

[Peter Grainge]

That's novel!

It sounds like you are seeing the tripane within the nav pane and just the topic area.

Assuming you have checked the book is linked correctly to the default topic and not somehow to the start page, I would create a new book and drag the topics to it, then delete the problem book.

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@petergrainge

[saiceav]

Yes, the book was linked correctly to the default topic and not to the start page. We actually fixed the problem that very day by inserting a page, as against a book, as the first topic in the ToC. Then we moved the other books to the left so what we had was a topic (the Welcome to XYZ sort of thing), and a couple of books in the ToC.

I decided to post a query here out of sheer curiosity. Had never seen such a problem and the 'why' is still niggling at me.

[Peter Grainge]

It certainly is not necessary to have a topic before the first book.

Does the problem come back if you restore the TOC to the format that caused the problem?

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@petergrainge

[saiceav]

No, we didn't have the same problem when we restored the ToC to its earlier format. Nor did we have a problem when we created another book and moved all the topics under that. Since we were used to seeing a Welcome topic first as a page, then books, if any, we chose to fix the problem with a page first, then the books.

If I do however want to check what was wrong with the initial book, are there any specific files that I should look at?