Error when opening chm

[Authorgirl]

One of our customers has just reported that when they open the help chm provided as part of the release, they can see the TOC but in the main window is the message 'Navigation to the webpage was canceled.' They can click on different parts of the TOC but get the same message.

They get this when opening the chm directly and it is on the local machine and not a network.

It works fine for me and my colleagues and no one else has reported a problem so it may be local settings or something but does anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing this?

[RoboColum_n_]

Get them to right click on the CHM file, select Properties and then click on the Unblock button.

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The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[Authorgirl]

Oh OK. Do you know how it might have become blocked?

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

What you are reporting is a classic indication of Microsoft Security blocking presentation of the CHM pages. This means the CHM has either been downloaded from the web or saved from an E-Mail attachment OR it might also mean the CHM is trying to be used while it is on a network drive.

What Colum advised would be used for the former. For the latter, the CHM needs to be copied from the network to the local C drive and accessed from there.

Cheers... Rick

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[Peter Grainge]

Content deleted, the posters problem was not about Blocked Content.

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@petergrainge

[RoboColum_n_]

You can ensure a CHM is not blocked. Check out this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902225

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The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[Peter Grainge]

Good luck trying to interpret the Microsoft article. Also it is about content not displaying, the poster's problem, rather than the CHM being blocked.

See http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/chm_mspatch/896358.htm, hopefully it is simpler to follow. Also there is a new workaround to the problem that your developers can implement.

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@petergrainge

[Authorgirl]

Thanks everyone.

The file is definitely on the local machine and I had thought that the customer had received the chm via an installer but I could be wrong. Anyway, I've passed on the 'Unblock' solution to support staff so we'll see what happens.

[Peter Grainge]

There has been some confustion in this thread and the problem is not that the file needs to be unblocked. The article on my site explains why your customer cannot see the topics and the solutions. All will need to involve your developers.

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@petergrainge

[Authorgirl]

Hi Peter. Thanks for the clarification.

Your article states that "In all cases this is where   the chm file is located on a server. Files on the users hard disk are not affected   by this patch."

We have a screenshot of our customer's files and they are definitely on the C drive. Are there any other causes of this behaviour?

[Peter Grainge]

I suppose you should check if they see the Unblock button if they right click the CHM file and click Properties. Maybe it is different on different operating systems.

Do they have IE9 installed? A different problem has been reported but it's worth asking.

Do they have this problem with other CHMs?

Is the problem only when the CHM is called from the application? (Does it work OK if they open the CHM direct?)

What is the path to the CHM in a standard install?

Not sure after that but let's get those two out of the way first.

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@petergrainge

[Amebr]

It certainly sounds a lot like the network/downloaded from internet issue. There's a screenshot here illustrating the issue and linking to solutions - I believe they are the essentially same as the ones Peter has documented (his may be more comprehensive and recent):

http://weblog.helpware.net/?p=36

A couple of thoughts:

Is the C drive location the users Documents/My documents folder? Sometimes corporations make this a network drive for backup purposes - it looks like C, but isn't really. If it is under Documents somewhere, moving the help to something like C:\test should prove if it is a 'secret' network location.

Also, right at the bottom of the post link I posted, someone said they had a # in the file path which caused the issue. I'd check for any special characters in the path or filename.

Amebr

[Peter Grainge]

That's a very good suggestion as it makes sense of why Authorgirl is seeing an error normally seen when the CHM is on a network drive.

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@petergrainge

[Authorgirl]

I was just replying to all your questions when I heard from support that the Unblock option worked. So although we didn't provide any files via download or email, perhaps they were distributed that way internally.

Really appreciate all your help, thanks.

[Peter Grainge]

I managed to locate a downloaded CHM and contrary to what I thought, the CHM does open with the same result as if it were not blocked but was on a network drive.

So if you installed the file and it was installed direct to the end users PCs, unless you issued a blocked file then it does look as if your customer must have distributed the file in a way that caused the problem. The other possibility is could your developers have taken the file from a location that would give that error? What argues against that is all your customers would have the problem. Might be worth checking though.

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@petergrainge

[Authorgirl]

That's a good point. The developers do get the help files from a network in which case they could very well be adding a blocked chm to the install. However I can copy files from that network and they're not blocked. And I think we would have come across this before.

Of course the other far scarier possibility is that the reason no other customer has ever had the problem is because they have never bothered to look at my lovingly crafted help! We do also provide webhelp though and I think a lot of them would use that - it depends which module they access it from.

I will investigate.