CSH issue - bsscdefault.h and <projectname>.ali not interacting

[Guest]

We recently discovered that some rather large, old Help projects seem to have lost coordination between the bsscdefault.h CSH map file and the associated .ali file that tells the project which topics are called by which CSH handles. This is a major issue for us, since we have thousands of CSH connections of this type.

I've spent a couple of hours looking for a way to force RH to associate the two but if it exists, I'm not seeing it. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance

.MW

[johndaigle]

Hmm. Not sure I completely understand "lost coordination". Do you mean the bsscdefault.h is correct and OK, but the project name .ali is not updating when you make a change to the map .h file? Are your project .ali files blank? Or, were they created from an older version of RoboHelp?

What version of RoboHelp are you using now? I'm just fishing here, but since you mention "old" help files, I wonder if it's an encoding issue? Since RoboHelp 7, the encoding for text follows UTF-8 encoding.

Open your mis-behaving .ali files and see if the following is on the top line:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Some posts on this forum have discussed somewhat similar issues (though not exactly.) These threads may give some clues:

1st row of ALI-file does not work

http://forums.adobe.com/message/814560#814560

.ali file is empty

http://forums.adobe.com/message/701156#701156

Sorry I don't have an answer off the bat, but let's proceed with that first.

Thanks

John Daigle

[Guest]

Hi John!

Mea Culpa. RoboHelp 8.0.2

When I say old, I meant to imply that these projects were created in RH5 and have been migrated progressively since then. When you say change the encoding is it as simple as changing the string from:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

to

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ANSI"?>

?

[Guest]

We're still struggling with this issue BTW. Converting the .ali file to ANSI was not the solution. The .ali file contains the Map IDs and filenames, as if there were still a connection, but the Edit Map ID's dialog box (from the Properties | Advanced tab) doesn't list the file as associated with the topic, even though the icon indicates that the Map ID is assigned to a topic.

.MW

[Guest]

This problem never went away, we just kind of left it alone for awhile. I have a question. Based on the Help in RH, I'd expect the .ali file to look like this:

rpw_table_TimeQuest_Timing_Analyzer_Summary_QRecoveryP=analyze\sta\sta_com_report_recovery_summary.htm
WED_Paste_Special=analyze\wed\wed_com_paste_spec.htm
Weak_High_QHP=analyze\wed\wed_com_dont_care.htm

When in fact, its been converted to XML:

<aliaslist version="1.0">
<alias name="Change_the_fileTs_grid_settings" link="analyze\wed\wed_com_grid.htm">
</alias>
<alias name="Waveform_Editor" link="analyze\wed\wed_view_editing_wave.htm">
</alias>
<alias name="TFW_Move_the_Master_Time_Bar_to_the_previous_logic_level_transition" link="analyze\wed\wed_com_prev_trans.htm">
</alias>

Which is what is causing our problems. Is this how it is supposed to be?

[Guest]

For anyone that has been viewing this, I've derived a solution.

The old "value pair" line format:

mapID=<project name><optional folder name><file name>

was upgraded to the XML format in RH7, which was when we started noticing the apparent disconnect. The problem was that RH parsed the file into an alias name and a link, directly, eg.

alias name="<mapID>" link="<project name><folder name><file name>"

Our problem lay in the <project name> value, which RH didn't need to show the link between the file and the mapID. A quick manual edit to remove the <project name> value fixed everything.

.MW