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A
Anonymous
April 24, 2013
Question

Webhelp output outdated

  • April 24, 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 1500 views

Hello,

I have RoboHelp 10 and  I'm running Windows 7. I have administrator priveleges on my machine. We use IE 9. I am publishing webhelp directly to our webserver (i have write access to our output folder on the webserver). We have a merged project environment. Once we re-view the site after i have made a change to the content, we are not seeing the change unless we reset IE's settings to factory default settings. I understand this more and likely is not a RoboHelp issue but any information regarding this fix would be much appreciated. I also want to mention some of the child projects have the thumbs.db file auto created in them; not sure it matters but want to mention. I read that the web server may be caching the content which means refreshing and hard-refreshing IE will not help show the updated, published content but i find it weird that if I reset IE's settings to factory, then everything displays as it should. I also publish the exact same content to my local machine and I am able to see the changes immediately.

I even added this to the Index.htm file (start page) on the parent to try to force IE to open the correct content:

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">

This did not help...

If you open the index.htm file directly from the web server location it is correct, but if you open the http address it is not.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated J

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

P
PS_De_Resistance
Participant
October 4, 2013

Currently working with our documentation team on rectifying this issue for all users of our help files. Although I'm not working with RoboHelp myself, I understand that adding the meta tag to the index will not affect any of the content pages, as the index file is a frameset. It is worth noting that any content pages pulled in through the frameset will still be held in cache by the browser/servers. Here in lies the problem, if you know how to manipuate the template for the content pages (not the index frameset) you will have the answer.

Willam van Weelden
Willam van Weelden
Inspiring
October 8, 2013

The topics don't have a true template. But if you want to tinker with the topic generation, look at the following files (never tried the topics before, so I don't know which of the three you will need):

%RH install dir%/RoboHTML/WebHelp5Ext/template_defaultskin/whd_topic.xml

%RH install dir%/RoboHTML/WebHelp5Ext/template_defaultskin/whd_topic_mindreader.xml

%RH install dir%/RoboHTML/WebHelp5Ext/template_defaultskin/whd_topic_roboinfo.xml

Greet,

Willam

Willam van Weelden
Willam van Weelden
Inspiring
October 8, 2013

Oh, always make a backup before tinkering with the seed files. If you break these, you may need to reinstall if you don't have a backup.

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
April 24, 2013

Hi there

You should probably investigate whether the server is "load balanced". What this means is that there is more than one server present. Data gets uploaded to one entry point and sometimes takes a brief while to propagate to the others in the system. This means that sometimes you see data from server A and sometimes from server B (or C or D or whatever) depending on the activity (or load) on the server at any given time.

As for the thumbs.db, that's a Microsoft Windows thing. The file is created when you change a folder's view to show you thumbnail images. Because it's a system file, it sometimes interferes by not allowing itself to be copied over. That *CAN* stop the flow of files being copied. So it's worth deleting them if you find them.

Cheers... Rick

A
Anonymous
April 24, 2013

Thank you for the quick response! I will ask our IT dept about the load balancing.

WiscoLori
WiscoLori
Known Participant
April 26, 2013

We had a similiar issue with our Help.  We now include cache code on every html page right after the <head> tag and that solved the problem:

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1" />
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />

We however are in development mode so didn't have to go back in and add this to hundreds of existing topics.

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