Book Missing from TOC after Compile

[Chicago_HPT]

Hi All,

This is compltely baffling to me. I have a project with roughly 120 topics and a very large number of baggage files (mostly PDFs). The TOC divides the content into five main sections, an introductory section, and a section for the baggage files ("exhibits"). I divided the Exhibits/Baggage section into a further five sub-books, one for each main section.

Here is a quick look at the structure (just the books/folders)

• 00
• 01
  • 01a
  • 01b
  • 01c
  • 01d
• 02
• 03
• 04
• 05
• Exhibits
  • X01
  • X02
  • X03
  • X04
    • X04a (lots of exhibits in this section)
      
    • X04b
    • X04c
    • X04d
  • X05 (no longer displays in finished compile)

For some reason, one of the TOC books does not display after compiling the project! It is there in the development interface and looking at the .hhc file in a text editor shows all the right contents there as well. My primary layout is WebHelp but it does not display when compiling to HTMLHelp either.

I tried removing the TOC section, saving, compiling, and then readding the section and recompiling, but that didn't work.  I tried moving the TOC section and not only did that not work, but even in a new location of the TOC, it was that particular section that did not show up!

I am using RH8.0.2 on a Win XP machine.

Does anyone have any thoughts? I would appreciate any help.

Thanks,

-jeff

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

First are you all patched up? If it's not appearing in the output, could it be some conditional build tags coming into play?

[Chicago_HPT]

Thanks for the quick reply, Jeff.

I think I'm patched up. I have a pretty current version, 8.0.2.208.

I am not using any conditional tags. I checked to see if I somehow managed

to tag something by accident but no, no tags. That's one of the things that

makes this so baffling and frustrating -- I can't see any reason for it.

-jeff

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Sorry I can't offer anything more - all my TOCs are built in Frame & are sucked into RH with no tinkering on my part.

[Chicago_HPT]

I removed the offending book from the table of contents, saved, and then added a new book. I gave it the appropriate name. I then added a topic to book for each each baggage file in the related section.

The new book appeared in the table of contents, but now only about half of the baggage file topics that I added display!

This is very frustrating and has upset my client. I would be grateful for any other ideas or suggestions.

Thank you,

-jeff

[Chicago_HPT]

Is there a limit to the number of entries that can be added to a table fo contents?!

[Peter Grainge]

No known limit and certainly nothing that would cause this problem.

How big is the whole thing zipped up, including the baggage files?

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[RoboColum_n_]

I'm shooting from the hip here so bear with me if I am off target. I'm just wondering if the TOC entries are to topic or pages linked to baggage files. Could there be an issue with massive numbers of baggage files in the TOC?

---

The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[Chicago_HPT]

@Peter - The whole this is roughly 450 MB zipped, though this issue has been going on for a bit so it may have been smaller when the problem first appeared. I can't say for sure about that.

@Colum - The TOC topics point directly to baggage files. I did forget to mention, however, that every baggage file is linked to at least one of the help topics within the project.

Thanks to everyone who's chimed in, or tried to think of an answer, so far.

As I slammed into my deadline, I removed the entire Exhibits TOC book and its children, and I replaced them with a help topic that has drop-down headings, each of which reproduces the behavior of the TOC books. I then put a link to the topic at the end of the TOC, where the Exhibits book used to be. It's a fairly elegant solution and my client is happy with the result, but I am still left with the question if not the urgency.

Why might this have happened?

Thanks,

-jeff

[RoboColum_n_]

My thinking was that there was a poing at which adding TOC links to baggage files may have been at fault. I have no evidence to back this up though and would have to test this out. I guess the same would go for what Peter had in mind.

---

The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[Peter Grainge]

I think that is a bit too big to consider downloading. Given the small number of topics, I assume most of the size is down to the baggage files.

Large numbers of topics and / or images can cause problems but these usually manifest themselves with slow working. As you haven't mentioned anything about that, I am assuming the project is working normally and just has this one problem.

I think this is what I would do using a copy of the project.

1. Reinstate the book where it was with the same links. It may just be that recreating it will do the trick.
2. Trash the CPD and see if that makes a difference.
3. Move the book to a different postion.
   
4. Experiment a bit with removing some of the links.

Try those things and post back with the results. Not sure what else we can try but we'll think of something.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Chicago_HPT]

The file is large, to be sure, but the end-deliverable will be downloaded from an FTP site and then burned to a CD. You are correct. The vast majority of the size is due to the baggage files (mostly PDFs).

I tried #s 1 - 3 already, to no avail. #3 was especially odd because the book did not show up, regardless of where I put it, so I figured it must be something wrong with that specific book (which is why I deleted it and then recreated it). I will monkey with #4 later this week and I will post the results.

Thanks for your suggestions and your time!

-jeff

[Captiv8r]

Hi Jeff

In addition to what Peter and Colum have offered, I'll also toss this out for consideration.

Back in version X5 (about 3 versions ago) I had a large project with many Baggage Files linked directly from the TOC. At that time there was a bug where the links would appear to be valid until you closed and re-opened the project. Then the TOC would list my links to Baggage Files as being broken. In an effort to fix this behavior, I ended up with something that actually assisted with another issue I was having.

What did I do?

I created an HTML page for each Baggage File. I then eliminated all the direct links to Baggage Files from the TOC. Instead, I linked to the redirect files. Essentially the HTML page loaded, waited for a brief couple of moments then redirected to open the associated Baggage File. (PDF or DOC format)

This totally corrected my broken TOC linking issue. Now for the unexpected side benefit.

My users would often report that links were broken. The links really weren't broken, but they thought they were because even on our speedy intranet, opening a PDF or a Word document took much longer to accomplish than displaying an HTML page. By linking to the Baggage Files via the HTML pages using Redirects, I was able to post some information on the page that advised the user to please be patient as the DOC or PDF was being loaded. Internally, I nicknamed these "DocFetch" files. The good news was twofold. Users stopped reporting that links weren't working and the links from the TOC were preserved when closing and re-opening the project. Life was suddenly much improved.

So it may seem like overkill to create the additional topic pages, but you may discover other benefits by taking this approach.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 moments from now - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcererStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Guest]

Just to add my .02USD, we use a variant of Rick's redirect file to open Captivate movies from the TOC. It allowed the Captivate gurus more control over the display settings, and it gave us a much more stable TOC.

As a side benefit, it gave us an easier way to make TOC links to Captivate movies in merged projects, so that we could have one overall Movies book in the TOC at the top level, but the movies could reside in the sub-level projects. That was something that our WebHelp TOCs used to have a fiendishly hard time with!

I think redirect files are definitely worth it for your project. And I'm not just saying that because Rick's a grandfather again and needs to be humored...

[ODoyle_Rules]

Hello,

We are having a similar issue. We recently upgraded from X5 to X8 and imported and converted our X5 project to X8 without any problems. After our conversion, we are having TOC issues. We patched up X8 to the latest version, 8.0.2.208.

This is what we are using:

XP Professional Service Pack 2
RoboHelp 8.0.2.208
RoboHelp Server 8

This is our project info:

1185 topic pages

WebHelp Pro layout
671 MB (Project size including baggage files, images, multimedia files, and topic pages)
7,357 files
174 folders

Here is our issue. Not all of our TOCs are displaying when we veiw our project through the engine, but if we view the project without going through the engine, all of our TOCs display correctly.

This is what our TOC looks like in our project:

This is what our TOC looks like after compiled and going through the engine:

This is what our TOC looks like after compiled and NOT going through the engine:

I've tried creating a new TOC and checking the Copy existing Table of Content box and deleting the old TOC and that did not work. I also deleted the TOC and rebuilt it from scratch (within X8) thinking the TOC messed up when it converted from X5 to X8 and it still did not work. I removed the following characters in the TOC and file names (&, <, >,) and that did not work.

We had 2 TOC pages linked directly to PDFs in our baggage files and I removed the TOC pages according to some ideas in this post, still no solution. I've tried Peter's suggestions #1, 2, and 3 without any success. I know this has been answered no, but it seems like the server is allowing a certain number of books and TOC pages to be published. I have checked to see if the pages have conditional build tags and they do not.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[ODoyle_Rules]

We moved most of our books outside and into the main level and published. It kind of worked, it did publish our missing books and pages but it did not publish all of them. It appears RH8 TOC might have a hierarchy issue. So far it looks like RH8 does not like to publish TOCs that goes 4 levels deep or more.

[Guest]

I've had problems with merged HTML projects and resorted to re-linking all child projects back into the master projects table of contents. The nasty thing for us was that changes made without doing this worked on the authors amchine but not when displayed locally on another persons machine. In fact we now use web help for our help files not html help because of this.

See also javascript:;

[ODoyle_Rules]

Does anyone know if this issue will be resolved in the new RoboHelp 9?

I did read this page and it is similiar to our issue http://notcolin.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/robohelp-server-8-and-the-table-of-contents/

[Peter Grainge]

Adobe will know but they never state in advance what is fixed.

If anyone else knows, they are bound by a NDA.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[rwrich21]

I have had this problem for quite some time. It seems like once your TOC goes to level 4 books go missing.

System Attributes:

RoboHelp HTML V8.02

RoboSource Control 3.1

RoboHelp Server V8.0

WebHelp Pro 5.50 (7.00.145)

[Peter Grainge]

That looks like some useful information that hopefully you have reported as a bug.

Everyone involved in this thread should report their bug as the more people who report a bug or request a feature, the more likely it is to be actioned. Please follow this link.

http://www.Adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=38

---

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@petergrainge

[MeWrite]

Thanks for this thread.  Just wanted to add our similar issue with Baggage Folders (PDF) linking from the TOC. 

Scenario:  Each Role has it's own TOC.  If the TOC is only linking to topics no problem.  Training wanted to add their manuals to the help, so we simply created a book at the end of each TOC and added the PDFs to the Baggage Folder.  We then added a page (per chapter) from the TOC to the baggage folder.

Issue:  Our first clue that something was wrong, was that the Helps that had the manuals already linked did not have the correct TOC.  For example, Role 1 has 5 book with 10 topics each.  After the Baggage Files were added to the TOC (last in the TOC), the TOC for Role 1 would show Book 2, Book 4 under Book 3 and all the other books and topics either missing or realigned out of order in other books that it should be in.

After ruling out Conditionalizing as the culprit, we removed the Baggae Files from the TOC and republished WebHelp Pro.  No problems with the TOC.

2 Observations:

1)  With the Baggage Files in the TOC we also published to FlashHelp Pro.  There are no issues with the TOC if you use FlashHelp Pro.  Although a simple switch in layout would be great, we can't do that since FlashHelp Pro does not have the ability to Rank Search Results.

2)  We created a standalone project for just the training manuals.  The TOC was just the baggage files.  After published it using the auto merge on RH Server, it broke the TOC for the role.

When I looked at the .hhc (TOC file) in notepad, it looks like several close tags are missing when it is generated.  My best guess is that FlashHelp doesn't care about the open tags, but WebHelp does.

Since several people seem to have success in linking to a redirected html page, we will give that a go. 

Regards,

CJ