Red Xs appear in my RoboHelp8 project over topics in the TOC

[Guest]

See image attached to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

This has happened several times lately (about once a month).  Operating system:  Windows XP, Service Pack 3.  Not using RoboSource Control.

The project is fairly new and has about 200 topics.  Adobe will crash and then when you open the project up, only a handful of topics are included in the project.  You can see in the TOC pane that the topics were there previously, but now they are no longer showing as topics in the project.  You can use explorer and go to the project location and see the .html topics.  I had to reimport those topics and in some cases there are issues with the topics after they are reimported.  We back up the project, so I have a backup copy and the last time it did this (about 6 weeks ago), I was able to use the backup copy and it worked fine.  This time I tried to use the backup copy and then the backup copy had the same issue.

This has happened to me previously using RoboHelp 7 as well.  Does Adobe have a solution for this problem?  It is very time consuming to fix.

Any thoughts out there?  Am I doing something wrong?  Thanks for your help.  Regards, Lana

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

A few questions to get more info:

• Have you installed both patches? Patch 8.0.2 fixes a problem with disappearing topics.
• Is your project on a local drive or on a network drive.
• Do you have special characters of spaces in file names/folders?
• Do you have long file paths in your project with lots of folders with long names?

As a tip, you can manually edit the .fpj files if you have a lot of missing topics. After that, delete the CPD and launch RoboHelp again.

Greet,

Willam

[Guest]

Hi William

Thanks for your quick reply.  To answer your questions:

Yes, the patches have been installed.

It is a local project now.  Previously, it was on a network with source control, but we had so many problems, we decided to get rid of source control and just back up the project daily, but we don't keep the previously versions, just one backup copy.

No special characters or spaces, unless you mean the file name like:  Getting_Started.htm (with the underline)

See image of properties of a topic attached.  Should we eliminate the File Name (underscores).  Has this proven to be an issue?

what do you mean when you say "I can edit the .fpj file?  Thanks again for your help.  Regards, Lana

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

Try this: close the project and rename/delete the project .cpd  file. This is an access database that will be recreated when you reopen  the project. If this does not help, somehow your project .fpj-files lost track of some topics.

Using your project on a network drive is a sure way to get in trouble. Your problems with source control probably come from using a network drive. Normally when you use source controle, every author has a local copy and keeps that in sync with source control. That is the only way to work with multiple authors in the same project at the same time. Good about the special characters. It might pose problems but using simple a-z and underscores is the right way to go.

Editing the .fpj files may be a leap, but saved me once or twice. RoboHelp uses *.fpj files to keep track of the topics in your project. These files are XML-files with a different extension. You can open them and edit them using notepad or any text editor of your choice. When you import or add a topic in RoboHelp, RH adds a link to the topic in these .fpj-files. Keep this as sort of a last resort, as it may be much quicker than manually importing all the topics one by one.

[Guest]

Hello and thanks to everyone that is trying to help.  I certainly appreciate it.

To answer a few questions that have been asked:

This project is about a year old and NO it was never under source control.  When our Application completely changed (Version 6.0 UI revamp), we decided to do away with souce control, since we thought that's what was causing errors/problems.

Now we have imported topics from the previous V5 project (that was under source control previously) into the V6 project.

Topics are created by both methods:  importing word documents and creating topics directly in RoboHelp8 using the design editor.  The project is a FlashHelp Pro project and generated to RoboHelp Server8.

We did add a lot of new captivate videos to this project.  We now have about 40 videos (1-3 minutes each) and the project has about 200 topics.

Please keep your suggestions coming.  We are trying everything that has been mentioned in this thread.

Thanks,

Lana

[Guest]

The information from the forum was really very helpful. Also, after consulting with our Technical Communication Office, we followed the following steps to restore the project, and it now works fine

1.    Close RoboHelp HTML.

2.    Create a backup of your project folder, and all its contents before following the remainder of the instructions below.

3.    Open your project folder, Windows Explorer.

4.    Find the *.XPJ and the *.CPD files, which are located in the folder.

5.    Delete the *.XPJ and the *.CPD files.

6.    Start RoboHelp.

7.    Via RoboHelp, open the *.HHP file (in the same folder as the files listed above).

8.    Save the project.

Hope this helps someone else in the future. Thanks, Lana

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

Does this also solve the problem of the disappearing files?

If anyone has problems opening projects, also check out the following article on Peter's site: http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/opening/opening_projects.htm.

Greet,

Willam

[Guest]

William - YES!!

All of the topics are now there and showing in the project.  We had to make a few tweaks, etc., but most of it was restored.  We used a backup copy, to perform the steps provided above.  What we found was any project opened in that local drive was not working right, even the backup copies.  However, once we performed the steps on the backup copy, we had the project restored.  We are looking into documenting some "best practices" based on the information that was provided on the forum.

Thanks for all of your help and suggestions.  Thanks to everyone on this thread.  I greatly appreciate it.

Regards,

Lana

[Peter Grainge]

Almost certainly the damage was done when the project was used prior to 802 being installed.

Please ensure you have followed all the steps on my site (link in Willam's post) to ensure you don't have further problems.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[RoboAsh]

Just to add to what Peter said, We should not upgrade our legacy RoboHelp Projects in RH 8 without applying all the patches.

The issue of crashing raised by Lana was due to such a scenario only.

RH 8 should not be used even to create a new project without applying all the patches (even if a new project was created with RH 8.0.1 and then RH patch 8.0.2 is applied then RH may crash with such a project)

Hope this helps

Ashish