Webhelp output outdated

Report · Apr 24, 2013

Hello,

I have RoboHelp 10 and I'm running Windows 7. I have administrator priveleges on my machine. We use IE 9. I am publishing webhelp directly to our webserver (i have write access to our output folder on the webserver). We have a merged project environment. Once we re-view the site after i have made a change to the content, we are not seeing the change unless we reset IE's settings to factory default settings. I understand this more and likely is not a RoboHelp issue but any information regarding this fix would be much appreciated. I also want to mention some of the child projects have the thumbs.db file auto created in them; not sure it matters but want to mention. I read that the web server may be caching the content which means refreshing and hard-refreshing IE will not help show the updated, published content but i find it weird that if I reset IE's settings to factory, then everything displays as it should. I also publish the exact same content to my local machine and I am able to see the changes immediately.

I even added this to the Index.htm file (start page) on the parent to try to force IE to open the correct content:

This did not help...

If you open the index.htm file directly from the web server location it is correct, but if you open the http address it is not.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated J

Report · Apr 24, 2013

Hi there

You should probably investigate whether the server is "load balanced". What this means is that there is more than one server present. Data gets uploaded to one entry point and sometimes takes a brief while to propagate to the others in the system. This means that sometimes you see data from server A and sometimes from server B (or C or D or whatever) depending on the activity (or load) on the server at any given time.

As for the thumbs.db, that's a Microsoft Windows thing. The file is created when you change a folder's view to show you thumbnail images. Because it's a system file, it sometimes interferes by not allowing itself to be copied over. That *CAN* stop the flow of files being copied. So it's worth deleting them if you find them.

Cheers... Rick

Report · Apr 24, 2013

Thank you for the quick response! I will ask our IT dept about the load balancing.

Report · Apr 26, 2013

We had a similiar issue with our Help. We now include cache code on every html page right after the <head> tag and that solved the problem:

We however are in development mode so didn't have to go back in and add this to hundreds of existing topics.

Report · Apr 26, 2013

Yes I added that tag as well but everytime you repub, you will have to add that back in, unless there is another method. We have it fixed now finally! We edited a setting on the webserver itself for our particular site to not cache. this solved it for us. Also, if anyone else is forced to use Internet Explorer as we do, there is a setting in IE you can change: General > Browsing History > Settings and check "everytime i visit the page". this will also solve it but everyone viewing the site will also have to do this...may be an option for some. I also read on another post from an adobe engineer who created a script to add that meta tag in each html topic, but i still believe those to be too time consuming and more of extreme workarounds. Easiest is webserver setting, then i'd say the IE setting. Thanks Everyone!

Report · Apr 26, 2013

Yes we knew about the IE setting too, but we have no control over our users so we are not really able to tell them to change their IE option, and some do not use IE. Our tag remains hard coded in the topic’s HTML. Whenever we create a new topic we just copy this code in (we are using our partner’s style sheets and master pages so cannot alter those). Unfortunately we cannot control the server environment either since it goes out to many different sites with different servers and also didn’t want to force the do not cache on them if they did not want it for everything. Glad you found an easy solution though!! ☺

Report · Oct 04, 2013

Currently working with our documentation team on rectifying this issue for all users of our help files. Although I'm not working with RoboHelp myself, I understand that adding the meta tag to the index will not affect any of the content pages, as the index file is a frameset. It is worth noting that any content pages pulled in through the frameset will still be held in cache by the browser/servers. Here in lies the problem, if you know how to manipuate the template for the content pages (not the index frameset) you will have the answer.

Report · Oct 08, 2013

The topics don't have a true template. But if you want to tinker with the topic generation, look at the following files (never tried the topics before, so I don't know which of the three you will need):

%RH install dir%/RoboHTML/WebHelp5Ext/template_defaultskin/whd_topic.xml

%RH install dir%/RoboHTML/WebHelp5Ext/template_defaultskin/whd_topic_mindreader.xml

%RH install dir%/RoboHTML/WebHelp5Ext/template_defaultskin/whd_topic_roboinfo.xml

Greet,

Willam

Report · Oct 08, 2013

Oh, always make a backup before tinkering with the seed files. If you break these, you may need to reinstall if you don't have a backup.

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Webhelp output outdated