Image icons disappear when CPD is deleted

[Alan_Davidson]

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

[Peter Grainge]

Alan

I suspect the problem is to do with the source control.

Create a project outside the source control but otherwise follow the same steps. Deleting the CPD should not lose track of the images.

Curious as to why you delete the CPD every day.

[Alan_Davidson]

Thanks for the reply Peter,

My test project (the one in which the image icons disappear) is not under source control. Curiously, the project I've been working in for years and in which some of the icons don't disappear IS under source control.

The reason I delete the CPD file in that project every day is as follows: Other writers make changes to some files and check them into source control. The next morning I pull those changed files down to my machine. At this point, before starting RH, I have the other writers' changes in various RH project files, such as topic files, the TOC file, the index file, etc., but my CPD file (which is not and cannot be under source control because it's a runtime-generated binary file) does not reflect those changes. If I start RH without deleting the CPD, RH seems to discover most of the changes that were checked in and move those into the CPD file. But "most" is not good enough. RH often seems to get into a confused state because of data contained in the newly checked-in files conflicting with data in my CPD file. By deleting the CPD file, I force RH to rebuild it using the data in the newly checked-in files. We often had problems where one writer would see broken links or missing files in RH but other writers wouldn't and deleting the CPD file would fix the problem.

[Alan_Davidson]

By the way, I'm using RH 7.02.001.

-Al Davidson

[Peter Grainge]

Looking at the source control issue first, have you retested all this under RH7? I ask as the internal changes might just make a difference. Don't know as I don't do source control but worth a try.

Going to back to the issue in the thread, could you send me the project? Use http://www.transferbigfiles.com or your preferred alternative. Email me via my site and include a link to this thread.