Need Advanced Help on Opening a Crashed Project

[SteveCTWriter]

I'm sorry to post many issues lately, but I've had a heck of a time this week trying to fix and recover a RH WebHelp project that is driving me nuts.

Today, I had just about finished re-importing all of my topics into a new project I had created that would have solved a rendering issue with my QT browser (I know it was working, because I uploaded output files throughout the day to my viewing machine and they worked great), when I happen to view one of my topics in HTML mode and noticed what I though was "errant" html code introduced from earlier "incident" (that's a story unto itself). I don't know why, but I deleted the <?rh-glo-start> tag on one of the lines in the topic (it was in a cell in a table). When I went to save the topic, the RH saving icon just kept spinning around and around and I knew I had crashed the project. I couldn't open it after that.

I went to Peter Grainge's web site (http://www.grainge.org/) and tried the various ways to try to open my project, but to no avail:

• deleted the CPD and use the existing XPJ file to open it
• used RoboHelp to browse to the HHP file to open it
• even removed the topic from the project folder that I did the HTML editing

Any other stuff I could try?

[Peter Grainge]

There is no need to apologise for the number of posts. First they have not been excessive and second, it's what the forum is for.

When you saved the topic you had edited, were there any other topics that were in an unsaved state? I am wondering if that edit is a red herrring and thinking perhaps some other topic or something else is the problem. I say that because with the rogue topic and the CPD deleted, if that topic was the problem then it could no longer cause RoboHelp to fail to open, it should simply have shown the topic as missing.

When importing topics, RoboHelp can have problems if you don't save regularly. That also makes me think maybe you just saved at the end and blamed the last topic edited when really it was an innocent bystander.

I assume your project is on your hard disk.

When you browsed to the HHP, RoboHelp will have prompted you to use the XPJ unless you had deleted it first. Had you deleted it and if not, did you select No when prompted?

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[SteveCTWriter]

Let me start with your last questions first:

• I did delete the XPJ file and selected the HHP file when trying to open the project
• the project was on my hard drive
• I remember doing "project saves" during the topic importing process, but whether I did one right before I saved the last topic I was editing, I can't tell. Perhaps this topic is a red herring like you said.

I am assuming that this version of the project is now beyond repair, and I am going to do another "reset" by re-importing all of my topics into a new project again. This time, I will make sure of doing project saves regularly, and perhaps even copying my project files to another directory every so often (like taking snapshots of known, good versions) so I don't have to start from scratch again.

[Peter Grainge]

Yes zipping up every so often is a good way to proceed. Let us know when you have got things up and running again.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[SteveCTWriter]

I finally have some good news - I re-imported all of my topics into a new project again, and this time everything worked. I also made incremental saves this time, so maybe I created good "karma" for the project.

One small issue is still left though - on one topic, whenever I import it, RH always presents this message:

The name of the file is Troubleshooting___CSLD.htm and it came from the same directory that all of the others topics were located that I was importing. Being somewhat gun shy from my all of the issues I have been having lately, I immediately deleted the topic from the project after I imported it.

I've tried importing it from different directories, and even renaming it, but it doesn't help. I'm assuming now the illegal characters are in the file itself, not in the file name. Any ideas what to look for in the HTML coding? It is a huge topic (of course - Murphy's law!), and it would be nice not to have to recreate it from scratch.

[SteveCTWriter]

Update - By showing this issue to a Software Programmer (who is a little familiar with RH), we figured out the issue.

First, we couldn't find any offending code in the the HTML file itself. However, after importing, and looking at the the topic in HTML view within RH, we did noticed that RH had generated hard-coded paths (\..\..\..\..) to four internal links (i.e., bookmarks). This was what the original error message was referring to, as we had to click OK four times before the message box finally went away. Who would have guessed that the offending code was being generated at the time of importing!

Once we removed the hard-coded paths, everything worked fine. Don't know why RH would do such a thing to these bookmarks, as there were 12 other bookmarks in the topic that were OK. My only guess is that when you are importing files that are legacy in nature (i.e., from older versions of RH), you never know what might happen!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

\..\..\..\.. isnt' a hard coded path. It's a relative path. Well, sort of. Typically a relative path is more like this: ../../../../

A "hard coded" path looks like this:

C:\SomeFolder\SomeOtherFolder\SomeFileName.Ext

LOL, perhaps we need a new term? Backward Cousin path?

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Peter Grainge]

RoboHelp usually writes the relative path in source documents with a backslash and converts the slashes to forward slashes when generating.

The second path shown in the image is an absolute path and the first one is to the same location but prefixed with backslashes. Seems very odd. You should be able to locate it by searching the code of the topic which contains the bad link.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[SteveCTWriter]

I was able to fix this problem relatively easy because there were only four instances in this one file,

I'm still scratching my head as to why RH would generate ANY paths for bookmark links that go to sections of its own (same) file. All of the other good bookmarks in this topic showed no paths in the HTML - they just used the notation "#bookmark".

[Peter Grainge]

The only thing I can think of is that somehow you created the link to an old copy of the project rather than the version you were working on. Even then, it seems odd the path would be written the way it was.

Hey ho, all is well now.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge