RoboHelp building corrupt CPD files?

Question

My coworker and I are trying to get Visual SourceSafe up and
running on her machine with RoboHelp so we can both work in the
same help project. We've got it working great on my machine (I
built the source control database from the help project on my
machine). We got the files down to her machine, but when we open
the help project, we get an error stating that the CPD file is
corrupt and we should delete it and reopen the XPJ. We did that,
and we got the message again, but when we looked at the directory
to delete it, we found that RoboHelp didn't even rebuild the file.
The error occurred before the file could be built.

It appears that the CPD file does not reside out in the
source control database. In other words, I have a working CPD file
on my machine, but it does not get checked into the source control
database. When we got her files the first time and opened them in
RH, her RH tried to create a CPD file and was not able to do it
successfully, so we got the error.

Here's my solution and a further question: I copied the CPD
file from my machine and sent it by e-mail to her, and we were able
to open the help project and RH successfully retrieved topics from
VSS. However, I wonder if there's something wrong with her
RoboHelp? It looks to me like her RoboHelp is not able to build CPD
files correctly. If that's so, can we expect other problems (maybe
it won't be able to update the file correctly either)? Should we
uninstall RH on her machine and reinstall it? If there's something
wrong with RH on her machine, I'm concerned that we'll keep having
problems after she starts making changes to topics.

If anyone can help, I (we) appreciate it.

Thanks!
Lisa

MergeThis · Accepted Answer

I'm sorry, obviously my message was too complicated. Rather than asking about what files I can check into source control, I was actually asking if there's something wrong with RoboHelp when it creates corrupt CPD files. Is this reason to uninstall RH and reinstall it, or was the problem fixed by supplying an uncorrupted CPD for the project created by a working RH.

Thanks,
Lisa

Rename/remove/archive the CPD and XPJ files, then double click the HHP file. RH will recreate fresh versions of those two files. This method also helps when the CPD file has simply gotten huge, not necessarily corrupt.

Good luck,
Leon

Amebr · Answer

I know this is old and marked as solved, but I thought I'd add this information here as it was the first topic returned in the search on "cpd is corrupt".

We started getting this message on a project we had copied to create a new project. It was confusing because the original project didn't suffer this problem, only the copied project.

After much searching we discovered it was because for the copied project, a blank rhvariable.apj file was created which didn't exist in the original project. (I assume because we deleted the cpd, pss and sss files and deleted the source control information out of the xpj file - not sure why it wasn't created when the project was upgrade to RH6 from X5...)

The solution to the problem was to add content from a working rhvariable.apj file. Voila, no more "the cpd is corrupt" messages.

The code for a blank variable file in RH6 is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
<rhpml majorversion="1" minorversion="0">
<variables/>
</rhpml>

Hope this helps someone in the future.

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