Big problem with merged project

[Guest]

Wow there's nothing like a deadline to bring all sorts of problems down on your head!
Anyway, I must have made a huge goof somehow. My main project has the release notes in it as a merged project. The release notes are also their own separate project. I opened that project (PBMNOTES), I updated the release notes, and generated them as a .chm file in the same folder that my main project is in (but used a different name - I have pbmhelp.chm and pbmnotes.chm). Somehow this caused the release notes to overwrite ALL of the topics in my main project!!
So, my .htm files and topics for the main project are still there in the C:\PBM\Help\HtmlHelp folder, but they are not showing up AT ALL in the main PBHELP project, except as broken links. This is pretty bad. I've been using RoboHelp for about a year but have never tried to merge projects before, and I couldn't find anything at all in the Help file about this, so I'm really really really really hoping I can do something to fix it. Should erase the PBMNotes from my main project completely? I tried to re-generate the main project, but it's only generating the release notes stuff. Hopefully this all makes sense, I'm a little frazzled....
Thanks in advance.

Erin

[Captiv8r]

Hi Erin

First off, I'm pretty sure that things are just appearing worse than they really are. Think of FEAR. It's an acronym meaning False Evidence Appearing Real.

Let's try and break it down a bit, shall we?

You said you have one project named PBMHelp. I'm assuming this is the "Main" or "Master" project. So you inserted the merged project and that one is named PBMNotes?

I'm a bit fuzzy when you refer to renaming something. You said you used a different name? Did you rename the Master or the Sub? If it's the Sub, you should be fine by just changing the name back to what it was.

Assuming that I'm misunderstanding, it may help to just return back to the bare bones basics. Delete the sub .CHM(s) from any Master location. Double check the output locations of both Master and Sub. Re-Compile each file and place both fresh files in a common folder that is different from the project folders. Then run the master and test.

Cheers and good luck. Rick

[Phil_Wells]

Hi ehoran,

I replied to somthing similar in a recent thread.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=65&catid=449&threadid=1276979&e...

See if the above is any use to you.

Phil.

[Guest]

Thanks for the help!
Hopefully I can explain myself a little better. My main project is PBHELP. PBMNOTES is the sub-project that I had merged into the main project. I had opened the PBMNOTES project to make some updates to it. When I generated the PBMNOTES.chm, it overwrote all the topics in my main project as well somehow. Now, when I open PBHELP, all I see are the topics for PBMNOTES. I can't generate a PBHELP.chm, because it isn't using the correct topics. I can see my PBHELP topics are all still in the folder where they should be, but I don't understand why RoboHelp isn't seeing them anymore. I deleted the merged project from the TOC in PBHELP, but I can't figure out how to get the original topics back, so that I can do the merge over again (and those instructions are very helpful Phil!), and generate the correct .chm.

[Phil_Wells]

If you haven't already found them, two very useful websites are:

www.grainge.org (Peter Grainge's site).
www.robowizard.com (Robowiz's site).

Lots of good stuff there.

OK, next thing to do (if you haven't already done it) is to take a backup copy of your projects. Just copy and paste into a different windows sub-directory: that way you'll always have something to go back to if things go further pear shaped.

I'm puzzled when you say you can see your PBHELP topics but they won't generate. Usually Robohelp won't generate for a reason. I'd check:

(1) Are your PBHELP Topics showing in your Table of Contents OK? If your topics are not in the TOC, they won't generate.

If you deleted your PBHELP TOC at the same time as you deleted the merged PMBNOTES file from the TOC, that'll be your problem.

(2) Have you got any conditional build tags set - if you get the logic wrong your topics won't print.

I'm further puzzled when you say your PBMNOTES overwrote your topics in your PBHELP project. When you merge projects, you import .chm files from the sub projects into the master. What you don't do is import the topics as .htm files directly.

The only way you can import .htm files [as opposed to the .chm files] is to use the File>Import>HTML file option from the main menu. These will only overwrite the .htm files in the main project if they have similar names (and you'll get a warning anyway)

Start up a new project and put in one or two dummy topics. Generate a HTML output. Use Windows Explorer to check on the resulting directory structure and where individual files are located. Go back to your projects and see your PBHELP files are in the equivalant directories.

Hopefully that'll give you some clues.

Finally, don't worry - this is probably solvable. Even if it isn't and you've got all the topics, we can create a 'cloned' project using those. There are ways round most RoboHelp problems.

[Guest]

Thanks Phil! I was able to manually import the topics back into the main project, so I think the crisis has been averted! The PBMNotes project has been totally combined into my main project, which is not quite what I wanted to do, but I'll look at fixing that later...

[Captiv8r]

Hi all

Naturally I never like to say something is flat out impossible, as I've encountered far too many "impossibilities" that occurred to say different. But personally, I'd be astounded if RoboHelp were to totally overwrite all the topic files and replace them with topic files from a different project.

Hmmm, in thinking about this, we *ARE* talking about RoboHelp HTML here and not RoboHelp for Word, aren't we?

And for that matter, what version are you using? I do recall an issue with version 2002 that was later addressed. It had a nasty habit of replacing the contents of one topic with the contents of another when rapidly double-clicking to switch topics. But if this were the case, it would only be affecting a single topic.

Cheers... Rick