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GnorbX
Inspiring
June 29, 2015
Answered

RoboHelp 11 Crashes When Opening a Topic

  • June 29, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 608 views

Hello,

We have a group of 3 writers working on one project. We use TFS 2012 as our versioning system, and are all on Windows 7.

This morning, one of the writers reported that two of the files within the project would cause RoboHelp to crash. This was verified by the two other writers (myself included) for the same files.

I've tried rolling the version of those particular files back to a known working date, but the application still crashes.

This issue is also preventing the creation of any new outputs.

(As a side note: Can anyone recommend any versioning system that might work better than TFS? This really is causing a lot of trouble for us. I literally have to spend at least 10 hours a week trying to figure out technical issues and inconsistencies between TFS and RoboHelp.)

Thanks in advance.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer GnorbX

Hi there

As it is only affecting three topics, one thought would be to simply remove the offending topics from the project. Copy them to a folder somewhere on your drive. Then delete them from RoboHelp. Create totally new topics. Then display them from the folder using the browser. Copy and paste the content from them to the new versions.

Cheers... Rick


Interesting. I believe I found the answer. This was a tricky one, actually.

Here's what I did:

  1. Copied the files out.
  2. Deleted one of the files from the project to work as a test.
  3. Saved.
  4. Added a new topic, named it the same as the old topic.
  5. Switched to HTML mode, and copied the code from the old topic to the new.
  6. Switched to Design mode and CRASH.

So it was definitely something in the code.

I opened the file using Notepad, and discovered that something weird happened with one of the variables:

<?rh-udv_start name="ApplicationName" ?><?rh-udv_start name="ApplicationName" ?>ApplicationX<?rh-udv_end ?><?rh-udv_end ?>

There was a variable tag embedded inside a variable tag. I removed the doubling so that only this was left:

<?rh-udv_start name="ApplicationName" ?>ApplicationX<?rh-udv_end ?>

I saved the file and it loaded just fine in the system. I did a search in the system for <?rh-udv_end ?><?rh-udv_end ?>, and discovered that 45 files were affected. (This was a relief, as the help file contains over 1800 topics.)

Why It Happened

If you're wondering where that bit of code came from, I'll have to take the blame for that. Our company just went through a re-branding. Whoever worked on this help file before wasn't really using variables. So I used the global find/replace to search for the old branding name and inserting the new branding name, plus the code to make it a variable.

Find: ApplicationULTRA

Replace: <?rh-udv_start name="ApplicationName" ?>ApplicationX<?rh-udv_end ?>

Unfortunately, it looks like whoever worked on the help file before THAT did use variables, but those instances were so rare that I hadn't really run into many of them. I thought I had converted the existing variables using the User Defined Variables pod before doing the global find/replace, but I guess I didn't.

So now, I'm cleaning up these files, using Notepad++.

Thanks to all for your help. Without your assistance, I wouldn't have been able to find this rather tricky issue.

1 reply

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 30, 2015

When is Rh crashing? My first thought was on opening the project but if that was the case you wouldn't get the chance to create a new output. I'm thinking you can open the project but generating an existing output causes a crash, correct?

Turning to creating new outputs, do you mean you literally cannot create a new one or that they somehow fail?

If you can open the project, have you tried generating with the rogue topics tagged out?

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

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G
GnorbXAuthor
Inspiring
June 30, 2015

The crashes happen while opening specific topics (not all topics are affected), and when trying to create an output.

  • (1) Open RH (2) Try to open one of the specific topic. (3) Crash.
  • (1) Open RH (2) Try to create the default output (3) Crash.

We've also discovered that attempting to importing a file also causes a crash.

As for the topics themselves, it seems that only 3 topics are affected by the Open -> Crash route. We're verifying that now. Unfortunately, these are three particularly vital topics.

What's more confusing is that these files were accessed successfully and checked in to TFS on Friday. No one worked on these during the weekend. On Monday, the problem started happening.

Edit: Unfortunately, we can't create the project with the items tagged out. This project has other issues which, unfortunately, preclude us from using tags at ALL. I'm trying now to recreate the project in hopes that (a) it fixes this issue, and (b) we can use tags again in the future. (The document, when I inherited it, was quite broken. I've made some improvements, but clearly not enough.)

Thank you for your time. It's much appreciated.

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
June 30, 2015

Hi there

As it is only affecting three topics, one thought would be to simply remove the offending topics from the project. Copy them to a folder somewhere on your drive. Then delete them from RoboHelp. Create totally new topics. Then display them from the folder using the browser. Copy and paste the content from them to the new versions.

Cheers... Rick

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