Table of Contents links not working correctly

[steveb72082501]

I'm using RoboHelp 2020 and some of the links in the TOC are doing strange things.  For example, I'm viewing Page A and select Page B in the TOC.  Page B correctly displays, but the TOC jumps to Page C, which is in a different section, and the breadcrumbs also show the path to Page C.  It's like something has gotten crosswired, but I haven't been able to figure out where the problem lies.  Any suggestions?

[davidk99046111]

i hit that issue if I only upload a portion of a new build to a server.  Adobe assigns each section and topic with ids in the toc when it builds.  If you create a new build but only upload a couple of topics, it will do that.

I found that if i only want to push a single topic, i upload the project data folder (called whxdata in my builds) and the entire folder for the section where i am updating a single topic. 

[steveb72082501]

This is happening even after I publish the entire project.

[davidk99046111]

You probably did this, but I thought i would ask - are you flushing your cache?  I usually have to flush and close the browser for TOC updates to appear after pushing.  For topics, I can just hit refresh a few times for the changes to appear but not the TOC. 

[steveb72082501]

It looks like all the topics that behave oddly have code similar to this in their source code:

where the gTopicId entry indicates the section and topic the TOC jumps to when this entry is selected.

Any ideas what this code is, how it got there, and how I can prevent it from returning if I delete it?

[Amebr]

Does this happen when you use the help on your C drive or only after you upload? If it's only after you upload,  that indicates a caching issue on the web server.

Typically javascript files are cached for a long time as they "don't change often" (tm). However, the table of contents in Robohelp is actually created from a bunch of javascript files, therefore you can get really odd results when the cached table of contents files are used to access your updated help. Can you ask your web server administrator to change the caching (max-age setting) on the whxdata folder to a much shorter time (you can set it to 0 (zero) to prevent these files being cached at all, which should solve the problem)?

[steveb72082501]

It was happening locally too.  I ended up deleting that block of script from every topic that had it (not every topic had it and some seemed to have the correct value for gTopicId) and it seems to have fixed all the weirdness.  I have seen no adverse effects so far, so still wondering what that code is and from where it came.  And if deleting it will come back to bite me later.

[Amebr]

Hmm, are you saying it was in the source files, not the output files? In that case you have somehow, at some point, managed to get output files in your project source.  I would delete that code from all source topics as it should only appear in output files and will be added by RH during the generation process as needed.

[Peter Grainge]

I think that code looks familiar from Classic days and importing Word documents. Could that be the case here?

I am also pretty sure it could be deleted without issue, which is what you seem to have found.

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