RoboHelp 6 Source Control Bindings

Report · Mar 16, 2009

Without going into best practices about source control methodology (we don't branch), I have a question about RoboHelp 6 and source control bindings with Visual SourceSafe.

We have a help project that is bound to a project in VSS. We need to create a copy of the VSS project and work on that separately. After creating the project in VSS with a copy of the RoboHelp files, there seems to be no way to update the RoboHelp project to point to the new location in VSS. We searched all the property and settings boxes we could find to no avail.

In searching, the xpj file seemed to contain the only source control binding information. We went so far as to change this file in a text editor to update the new project and even point at the correct file it references in VSS for the new VSS project. This is in the vc::cookie setting under misc properties in the file. When opening this file RoboHelp updates it back to the original somehow even when the correct one is in SourceSafe.

So, please tell us how to update the bindings for source control.

An aside. Recently our help files were moved to a new VSS database. The old one was taken offline. In this case when Robohelp saw that the old database was no longer there, it prompted us with a dialog to correct the binding. Now that we need to point Robohelp at a new VSS project in the same VSS database, while the original still exists, we can find no way to change the settings.

Thanks...

Report · Mar 20, 2009

bump...

Report · Mar 26, 2009

There are several things to do to remove a copy of a project from VSS:

1. Make a backup, as always.

2. Copy the RH project to your new location.
3. Set all the files as writable.
4. As you've discovered, you need to remove the contents of the miscproperties tag.
5. Delete the cpd and sss files, and maybe the pss file (I'm not sure of this one, but I'm fairly sure it gets recreated when you re-open the project).
6. Open the project in RH and add to VSS from within RH. (I recommend using RH to add into VSS, as this will re-populate the miscproperties section of the xpj file. If you don't, you have to manually "open from source control" each time you open the project.)

You should now have a new project in VSS. And you have backups, right? (not that I'm paranoid or anything...)

HTH
Amber