Cannot link to excel or word documents

[flatk]

I have been trying to link to excel and word documents in Robohelp but am receiving page not found when I publish. When I compile I can view the word or excel link but as soon as I publish to our servers the page is not found. I have these files stored in the baggage folder and work fine outside of the server. As stated before, as soon as I publish to the server the file cannot be opened and is no longer found. Am I doing something wrong?

[prhmusic1]

Can you post an example of the syntax you are using to link to the Excel or Word file?

Paul Hanson
Technical Writer
RoboHelp ACE - http://www.macromedia.com/support/forums/team_macromedia/robohelp.html
Quintrex Data Systems http://www.quintrex.com
email: phanson at quintrex.com

[flatk]

Here is my syntax for the link:

<p>If a mainframe production problem occurs, use this <a href="Incident_Report.msg" target="blank">email incident report</a> link to submit your issue.</p>

The Incident_Report is located in this exact folder. Do I need to add a ../ since I have this located in my baggage folder? As stated before, the link works fine until I publish it to the server.

[johndaigle]

Couple of thoughts come to mind. Check with the Web Administrator to make sure .MSG, .XLS, .DOC, etc. are registered as MIME types on the web server with the appropriate application to open them. The Outlook message MIME type is "application/msoutlook"

You didn't mention if the Web server is IIS on a Windows OS or something like Apache on a Unix/Linux OS? As jaalamlady mentioned, you may want to tick the box for lowercase filenames shown in the WebHelp publish wizard's first dialog screen in case it is UNIX.

Finally, as far as Baggage is concerned, note that the folder tree structure is displayed in the Project tab's Baggage section. Be sure your files are in the appropriate folders where your topics reside to resolve any path issues. You can even click and drag the particular baggage file on top of your link text to create the hyperlink. That way you know the path is accurate.

Let us know if any of this worked
John

[Guest]

I have had some instances where a Help link worked fine until it passed through our CVS server, which in turn provides input to our build process. In each case it was due to uppercase/lowercase anomalies. For example: In WebHelp, If I change an image name from uppercase to lowercase, the Help link to the image still works fine on my desktop. However, since CVS is case-insensitive, it does not pick up the change when I update CVS, and still stores the file name as uppercase. CVS then provides input for a new build of our application. When the affected image is called in the new build (as a separate page), my compiled Help is calling for a file with a lowercase name, but can't find it, and we get a "page not found" error. To correct this we have to delete the uppercase file completely from CVS, which sometimes involves killing it in the attic. Then CVS will allow me to update the file as lowercase, and the problem disappears. Some server apps are not case-sensitive.

[flatk]

Thanks for everyone's help. After changing my excel and word files to undercase, they worked fine. Our Web Server is running IIS on a Windows OS. Unfortunately, I still can't get my .msg links to open. I am in touch with the system administrator to resolve the problem. Thanks again!