Topic title missing in breadcrumbs

[louellen_20210224]

RoboHelp 2020.7.46, Frameless layout, Studio skin

I am having an issue where the breadcrumb trail includes only the word "Home:" and does not include the topic title. This happens only with some of my topics, and those topics are all [several levels deep] in three subfolders in my source project. I cannot figure out anything these topics or folders have in common that is different from the rest of my files and folders.

In Inspect mode, I see that the breadcrumbs are formatted as an unordered list. So when this works correctly, for example, I see this HTML code for the topic titled "Employee List":

<ul class="RH-LAYOUT-BCRUMBS-list-box ">
<li class="rh-layout-BCRUMBS-list-item RH-LAYOUT-BCRUMBS-active-topic">
::before
<a class="RH-LAYOUT-BCRUMBS-active-topic " title="Employee List">Employee List</a>
</li>
</ul>

When this doesn't work correctly, all I see is this:

<ul class="RH-LAYOUT-BCRUMBS-list-box "></ul>

There is no list item with a link to the active topic.

(Also note that when this happens, the Contents panel is blank, even after you refresh the browser window. I don't know if this is a related problem.)

The content of the topic displays correctly, and I've verified that the topics where this happens do have titles. I don't know what else to check. How does RoboHelp create that <li> and when would it not be created---any thoughts?

[Amebr]

It's not something I've seen reported. Can you provide some examples of the files (titles and file names) that don't have breadcrumbs vs those that do? Perhaps we can see a trend.

[Amebr]

Oh, also, the latest patch as of today is Update 8, so you could try updating and see if the issue is still in the latest version.

[louellen_20210224]

I'm afraid that installing Update 8 is not an option. I'll have to wait until it is rolled out throughout the firm and who knows when that will be. 😞

I have scoured the paths and titles and everything I can think of and I don't see any difference between the topics that work and those that don't. For example: /Employees/Manage/List.htm correctly displays the title "Employee List", but for /Accounts/Manage/List.htm (which shows <title>Account List</title> in the HTML) the title is blank. I tried changing the title of the Account List topic just to see if the new title would be picked up; again, the <title> code is correct but it's not being displayed.

Something is preventing RoboHelp from creating the <li> tag for the active topic in most (but not all!) of the topics in three of the subfolders, but I can't figure out what it could be. 

[Amebr]

Are they the "deepest" topics you have? What happens if you move the Account List topic into the root folder of the project (in the Contents panel, not in the Table of Contents panel)? If it works that might suggest a Windows path length problem.

[louellen_20210224]

They are not at the deepest level of this folder structure (I didn't set this up; it has FAR too many levels of subfolders to be workable in my opinion). The folder structure of /Accounts is exactly the same as the folder structure of /Employees. These topics are meant to be context-sensitive help and are linked by the full path, so if I start reorganizing things, that will cause problems. But I am seeing this issue locally as well as on the server. 

[Amebr]

I just meant to try it temporarily as a test to rule things out.

[louellen_20210224]

Ah OK. I just tried that and the results are the same. Grrrrr

[louellen_20210224]

After the better part of two days, I seem to have stumbled onto a solution, but I still can't explain it satisfactorily. It was not the subfolder structure that was too complex, it was the Table of Contents. When I started moving topic files out of subfolders where the issue was occurring and into the parent subfolder in the TOC, suddenly the title appeared in the breadcrumbs and the Contents panel was displayed as it should be. 

Fortunately this doesn't change the output paths of my topics, so my context-sensitive links shouldn't break, but it doesn't make sense that only 3 subfolders in the entire project were affected. Maybe there's a bug in there somewhere, but for anyone else who might stumble onto this issue, I'll just leave it as this: check the complexity of your TOC and see what you can do to simplify it.