chm file linked to an application is not working

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
July 11, 2008
2 replies
952 views

Hi friends,

I'm new to this forum. Ofcourse our company is new to RoboHelp. Right now we are using RH6. Developers have designed an application and they had integrated the chm file which i developed in that application. But when i open the chm file in the application, it is not opening. Spent huge time since morning in reading topics addressed in this fourm....kindly guide me to solve this...

HTML

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

I am having a similar problem, except the *.chm help appears accurately if selected from the Help menu of the application, but it does not appear by pressing F1 (I get a "Failed to Launch Help" message).

I'm told that my older versions of the *.chm files work with F1 in our current application.

Any ideas how this anomaly can occur? I'm using RoboHelp HTML 6.

thanks,
ChristyG

Captiv8r

Legend

Hi Christy

This can occur in a variety of ways. Assuming the older .CHM files work just dandy and the new one doesn't, the finger would certainly seem to be pointing at your .CHM file, no?

I would begin by inspecting a working vs a non-working .CHM file and see what the differences are. You may need to decompile each and look at the files. You are probably interested in files with the following extensions.

.H
.HM
.ALI

Cheers... Rick

A

Anonymous

Thanks for your response!

I found out what the problem was. Somehow my topics lost all their links to the map file. This may have occurred over six months ago when I copied a help project from one folder to a new folder. (Perhaps I broke the links when I did that.) Anyway, I imported the latest HTMLDEFINES.H file and mapped my main default topic to the HIDR_MAINFRAME map ID. This has always been the map ID for me to assign to the default help topic whenever I want the topic to appear from the main application window. (I compiled the help project and tested it out with the application. The F1 link now works!)

Another saving grace for me is that I've always created an Excel spreadsheet of all context-sensitive help topics and list what map ID they should be assigned to. I'm glad I've been doing this because otherwise I'd have to re-invent the wheel and determine which help topic I should associate with which map ID. (Our developers always have weird map ID names that are not easily identifiable.)

Happy Friday!

ChristyG

RoboColum_n_

Legend

Hi chandhini and welcome to the RH community.

So we can help you, can you confirm exactly what the problem is. "Not opening" can mean any number of things. Does the CHM window not open? Does it open but at the incorrect place? Where is the CHM (e.g. user's local PC)? Are you using Context Sensetive Help? Sorry for all the questions but we need to know to be in a position to help further.

C

chandhiniAuthor

Participant

Hi column,

As requested, let me try to give more details to the problem:

The application is a webapplication and the chm is placed in a Server.

When we click Help Guide in the application, the message is:
Do you want to open the file.

When we say Open, the chm file opens with the message "Page cannot be displayed at the right hand side"

Only when we say "Save", we are able to save and open the saved chm file.

As of now, We are not using any "Context Sensitive Help".

But we are able to open a linked PDF file (Help Guide) without any error msg..

Hope to some extent, this would help to answer my problem.

P

Pete_Lees

Participating Frequently

Hi, chandhini,

This problem is caused by some security restrictions on the use of HTML Help files that Microsoft imposed in 2005. These restrictions are designed to make remotely-accessed help files unusable until the user decides that they are safe to open and then takes the appropriate actions to do so.

You can read more about this here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=902225
http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/chm_mspatch/896358.htm

In general, it's normally better to use a browser-based format like WebHelp with Web applications, rather than HTML Help.

Pete

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