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claud2134
Inspiring
October 21, 2016
Answered

Deployed webhelp toc has duplicate pages

  • October 21, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1015 views

RH11, Windows 7 Enterprise

Problem: Deployed webhelp toc has duplicate and deleted pages.

Background: Our development team pushes Help from our Atlassian bitbucket server to QA test, user test acceptance (uat), and production release, to add it to our product. Same Help file and product for over a year. Found after production. I see it was also in uat, but we missed it.  We're in the next QA test cycle now, and the issue isn't seen, but I need to make sure it's fixed.

Image: Contents pages under Students Module were duplicated under Groups Module, and the Groups Module pages were gone. 

Where issue was/is not seen:

  • Does not appear in today's QA test deployment.
  • Did not appear in a previous standalone webhelp published to an internal server.
  • Did not appear within my project. Files are fine, output is good.

Here's some things that occur to me, but I don't know how to check them:

  • Some developers are new. Is there an error they could have made in the deployment?
  • If bitbucket went offline when webhelp files were being picked up, could a file have been corrupted, such as the whtoc.js file?

Thank you for your thoughts!

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer claud2134

Captiv8r  All I can think is there is some weird combo of local and server caching going on. I find that sometimes clearing the cache and re-opening immediately still shows the problem, whereas clearing and waiting for a period fixes the issue.

(I've added code to prevent caching of HTML files, but the table of contents is all in an xml (or js in xml format? I forget which) and I'm not up with how to modify that. Possibly the file could be manually excluded from caching on the server, but that is a whole nother can of worms.)


Your caching suggestions were right. Our developer advises the person who deploys the webhelp to make sure the server is putting "Cache Control: no-cache" on the files it serves. Thanks everyone!

1 reply

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
October 21, 2016

Hi there

Some of what you are talking about is very confusing. You seem to be co-mingling possibly internal terminology that makes sense only to people in your environment with basic RoboHelp stuff.

From what you have shared, it seems that in some cases you are seeing this odd duplication. What I'm unsure about is if this problem has at this point totally disappeared and you no longer see it, but you are concerned there is something that could cause it to return, or if it's still occurring for certain users.

You ask:

Some developers are new. Is there an error they could have made in the deployment?

While that's certainly possible, there is no way of knowing for certain without keeping a close eye on their output to see if this problem manifests after one or more of them generate output.

You also ask:

If bitbucket went offline when webhelp files were being picked up, could a file have been corrupted, such as the whtoc.js file?

This statement is what I was referring to at the beginning. What in the world is "bitbucket"? Is it a source control system? Document management system of some type?

As for files somehow getting "corrupted", I suppose that's always a possibility. The only way to know for certain is to compare known good versions with the suspect versions.

Another somewhat confusing aspect is that you are saying that "pages" were duplicated or missing but all I see in the image are books. Are you saying that there are no pages inside the books?

Cheers... Rick

C
claud2134Author
Inspiring
October 21, 2016

Sorry Rick. I was trying to be specific for people doing the same thing and included the bitbucket source control system in case they've seen troubles there. However, I should have been more general and the forum won't let me edit the posting.

The duplicated menu nodes (seen only as books here) are duplicated down to the page level. Here's what one developer reported last night:

"I tested and believe it's a javascript problem. I disabled javascript in my browser (IFirefox with the NoScript plugin). After that, the menu behaved a bit differently, but still functional. The major difference I noticed is that I'd have to click on a menu link twice in order to get it to work. However, it also fixed the issue of the duplicated menu nodes. That leads me to believe that it's an issue with the javascript that controls the menu population. I checked the different javascript files referenced by that menu frame, and they all appear to have the same contents".

So we're still trying to figure it out. Yes, we're concerned that it may happen again. Thanks for your thoughts, I appreciate your experience with Robohelp.

Linda

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 21, 2016

You can't disable Javascript and expect WebHelp to work - it's baked right into the product. If your copy of it works and another's doesn't, throw it away & recopy all the files again.
BTW - eventually browser security issues are going to sabotage your RH11-produced WebHelp - at that point you're going to need a more up-to-date version of RH to get patches issued.

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