Messed up output

[Guest]

Three serious problems occurred when I generated a WebHelp system (using Robohelp X5.0.2, Build 801 on Windows xp), which had successfully generated many times before.

1. I have a topic with four links. One link uses the default link text: the title of the target topic. Three of them use other text. When I preview the topic in Robohelp (Ctrl-w) all the links work. However, when I generate the project and view this topic in the generated webhelp system, only the one whose text is identical with the target title works. The other three are not even formatted as links. I checked another topic with non-default link text, and it worked properly.

2. A number of topic files (not including the one mentioned above) disappeared from the !SSL! – output folder. These files appeared in the output, and remained in the top level directory, but were simply gone from the output directory. (This is similar to what happened to cde_not, see the General Discussion post of 8/9/06, but it is clearly not a network problem since I am working locally.)

3. Numerous links present in Robohelp disappeared from the generated Table of Contents.

In an attempt to resolve these issues, I
- removed the !SSL! folder from the project directory
- re-opened robohelp with the same xpj file
- regenerated.

Lo and behold, the same problems recurred. What might I be doing wrong?

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Perhaps the simplest test would be to just generate to another folder on your hard disk.

If that fails, try deleting the XPJ as well but read this first. Click here.

[Guest]

Peter Grainge's method of deleting the cpd and xpj files and starting from the hhp file worked. (Actually, the xpj file had disappeared on its own.) The new cpd file is about 1/3 the size of the old one. That was a lot of crud! Thanks!

Harvey's caution about contitional build tags seems to be part of the story. I will have to rebuild them.

[HKabaker]

This sounds almost like normal behavior if you are using conditional build tags.

Incidentally, if you have conditional tags and delete them, sometimes RH doesn't completely clean up the source code.

Look for extraneous "x-condition" tags.

Harvey

[Peter Grainge]

You only need to create new tags with exactly the same names as the old ones. I think Harvey's point was that you are generating using a build expression and if the link is to an excluded topic, it will appear as normal text.

[HKabaker]

Peter,

Quite true. If topic A has a build tag NOTNOW, and topic B has a text link to topic A, and Al generates WebHelp to exclude NOTNOW items, topic B will show the text with no link.

If Al attaches a NOTNOW tag to the link text in B, it will be entirely omitted from topic B in the conditional output.

I think Al had the additional problem of a corrupted cpd and/or xpj file. Suppose he had removed the NOTNOW tag from topic A but the cpd file wasn't properly updated. Topic A might appear, but the link in topic B is suppressed.

This is theoretical; I don't have time to replicate it. But the cpd file was a lot smaller when it was restored.

Al, by any chance did you ever work on this RH project when it was stored on a network drive, and then moved it to your local disk? That's one reason this could happen, but there may be other causes.

Harvey

[Guest]

Harvey,

quote:

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Al, by any chance did you ever work on this RH project when it was stored on a network drive, and then moved it to your local disk? That's one reason this could happen, but there may be other causes

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The project goes in and out of visual sourcesafe, but the editing is all done one my local drive.

Concerning the damaged links, the links that disappeared pointed to topics that were not conditional, but your analysis helps me understand conditions in RH and is likely to come in handy in the future. Thanks!

- Carol (Albizzia is a favorite herb of mine)