RH 2020.6 > Broken Links > JavaScript

[SRHVines]

Hello - we upgraded a project from RH2015 in September - were sent the link to RH2020 build .0 to download, upgraded the project and after hitting lots of issues, an Adobe agent informed us we were 6 builds back and needed to uninstall/reinstall. We were provided a link to RH2020.4 and told to use the Help > Check for Updates option in the app to move to .6. 

After the upgrades, we found many topics completely dumped (0kb) and broken links - the bulk of which we have resolved by going to backups from the various stages. Regarding the empty topics, the authoring & source views of most were blank...I opened the .htm files in Notepad, copied the html code and pasted it into the source view of the topic & saved...this seemed to fix the issue. Hopefully I didn't introduce more problems by patching things this way. 

The Broken Links report is listing a number of JavaScript breaks - some of which point to files in the \assets\js folder and some to other locations. The \contents\assets\js folder is empty in our upgraded project. Not sure where to start looking to resolve this or if it's even a cause for concern.

Thank you for any assistance you can provide. 

[Amebr]

Those javascript references look like output files, so if you copied code from RH output then I think you will need to do a lot of cleanup.

Even if you copied code from RH2015 source topics, the html and other behind-the-scenes things changed a lot, so you probably have some cleanup to do, although I can't say exactly what.

If you haven't made too many changes, I would recommend trying to upgrade your RH2015 source project again. Also make sure you're upgrading using the latest version (update 7 at the time of writing), as I believe the first several updates to RH2020 weren't great at upgrading older projects. (Backup this project in case you still can't get the upgrade to work using the latest version, so you at least don't have to re-copy code.)

[SRHVines]

Thanks for the quick reply.  I copied from source files that in most cases were from the RH2020 build .0 upgraded set. We're pretty far down the road, in the middle of a software launch of our products and haven't published for a month. I'm no super user but have had RoboHelp since it was a Blue Sky product. I've never had a project stepped on like this. This has been a serious train wreck. If the best outcome is to get up on .7 and reupgrade, guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and do that. 

[Amebr]

Hmm, that's really weird having those javascript references in your rh202 source files, but RH2020.0 did have a lot of bugs.

Given you seem to have made a lot of changes since you originally upgraded your project, then re-upgrading probably isn't the way forward.

I'm pretty sure those js references are all for the output, so you should be able to delete them from the topics (they'll be added as needed when your output is generated). As always, backup your project in case something goes horribly wrong.

Open the topic, switch to the html view and you should find the reference at the top of the topic like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="./template/scripts/rh.min.js"></script>

Delete that code for each entry. Here's the list of the main output scripts and css from a test project I have when I was assessing whether to upgrade to RH2020 (files from update 5). Might help you determine whether to keep a reference or not. 

common.min.js
layout.min.js
layoutwidgets.min.js
rh.min.js
topic.min.js
topicwidgets.min.js

layout.min.css
layoutfix.min.css
topic.min.css

I think the whmsg.js file is an old webhelp output file. You should be able to delete that one safely as well. There's any number of ways that could have gotten into your RH2015 source files and you'd never have noticed it.

If there are others you're not sure about, post them here and we can have a look.

You could also wait for a few hours until Peter comes online, as he has a current copy of RH2020 and might have some more ideas.

[SRHVines]

Thank you for the glimmer of hope before I launched myself over Niagara Falls in a bucket. 

Having moved up multiple versions, my first assumption was that I didn't understand how things were retooled - not that things had been stepped on.  I went into find & fix mode for weeks. There are 2,223 topics in our master project that 16 different Help files are spun off of. I really don't look forward to having to retag most of them for the new group conditionals. 

[Amebr]

It's unfortunate you got the download link for the first release, as many improvements were made to the project upgrade process in the later updates (and one of the bugs in the first release is the Help > Updates process didn't work, so you had to know to download an update manually). Hopefully deleting those references will be fine and your output works okay.