The product I document is undergoing a major upgrade, so our
doc team has decided to start a new RH project. When we created our
original RH project, we were new to RH and made a number of
mistakes in how we set up the project and used RH. This time we
want to get it right.
I'm having a particular problem in understanding how RH keeps
track of inserted images. I have created a new, very small test
project and am playing around with inserting images to try and
ascertain a best practice for inserting and managing images. I have
NO problem in getting images to display in topics, but getting the
image icons to display in the Project Manager is tricky. One
important point I discovered is that if you create a folder for
your images, you have to do it in RH rather than in a Windows
Explorer. When you do it in RH, the FPJ file in the parent folder
lists the newly created folder and an FPJ file is created within
the new folder. The result is that as you insert images, image
icons appear in the folder in the RH Project Manager.
I've run into a problem, though. If I shut down RH, delete
the CPD file, and restart RH, the images are no longer displayed in
the RH Project Manager. The images are still on disk in the correct
location and they display correctly in the topic, but their icons
are no longer displayed in the RH Project Manager. I tried greping
the project files for the name of one of the image files before and
after deleting the CPD file. As I expected, the CPD file, itself,
contained the name of the image file before I deleted it. After
restarting RH (which rebuilds the CPD file) the CPD file did not
contain the name of the image file. This was expected. The
unexpected part was that this was the only file that changed. I
expected the image file names to be stored in some text file so
that that information can be added to the CPD file when it
rebuilds. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Now, here is the really odd part: in the old RH project that
I've been working in for years, some image folders in the RH
Project Manager display image icons, but some don't. In this
project, I delete the CPD file every morning after pulling down the
lastest revision of files from our source control and before
opening the project. Somehow RH has knowledge of the image files
whose icons it displays in the Project Manager and this knowledge
is not contained in the CPD file. Where does it keep this
information? I'm assuming that it isn't simply looking at the file
structure to ascertain this, otherwise it would include icons for
all of the images, which it is not doing.
Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated as well as
any other best-practices tips for a new project.
Thanks,
Al Davidson