Skip to main content
S
shhimwriting
Known Participant
July 29, 2013
Question

Why do files drop out of WebHelp builds when they exist in the original project?

  • July 29, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 4194 views

I am using RH 10 (upgraded early June 2013), Windows 7 and we support IE 9, Chrome, and Firefox.

I build my WebHelp to a WebHelpGenerated folder before checking it into CVS for my development to pull and place in our product.

My project has 1200 files.

I update a topic, save, generate, and lately the build has missing topic pages.

They display in the TOC, but the file is missing altogether and when I check the output View in RH10, it is missing there too, but the file is in the existing project folder. Somewhere along the way, the build is not picking up miscellaneous files.

In 2 of 3 cases, in my project folder, I had the original file and what I assume is some kind of duplicate file, that had a tilde symbol, for example, instructions~.htm. I didn't have permissions to do anything with this file, but after a reboot, I could delete the file, rebuild the Help and everything would be fine. In one case, I didn't have the odd file, but couldn't get the missing file in the build until a reboot.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
July 29, 2013

Hi there

Files don't typically just "fall out" of a build. Are you certain that you aren't using some sort of build expression along with Conditional Build Tags that is causing this to happen?

Cheers... Rick

S
shhimwritingAuthor
Known Participant
July 29, 2013

Perhaps "fall out" was the wrong way to describe, but random files are not getting built so when you try to open the topic, you get a "page not found" error, since the htm is missing from the output file.

To answer you question, no, I don't use build tags.

Thanks

R
RuWriter
Participating Frequently
July 30, 2013

Hi there

You say:

Since we have done this for a while, even with RH8 and didn't experience this issue, we find it hard to believe this is the root cause.

And yet here you are having an odd problem, no? So what changed?

The version of RoboHelp you say? Yep, ANY new version of any software I've ever seen is apt to have unexpected behavior in some respects. Some choose to call these, "features". Now don't get me wrong here. RoboHelp 10 is *supposed* to work better than its predecessors with network drives.

The fact is, you are using some monkey business with drive letters. And to me, that's suspect. As an initial troubleshooting step, I'd simply generate to the C drive and see if the problem clears. It's a very simple way to test. If it clears, you have your answer. If you still see missing files after you switch to C, then something else is afoot and you would be free to change back to the favored E drive to continue.

Cheers... Rick


Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Shhimwriting and I have done several tests to try to figure out what is going on (we are each the lead author for two different projects). I'll try to summarize what we've tested and what our results have been; sorry if this gets long, but I'll try to give you as much detail as I can so it's clear what we did.

Today, I made edits to several topics, saved them, and generated a build as usual to the E drive. One out of three topics I worked on was missing. I tried generating again (same steps, same drive) to see if that would fix it because simply regenerating has fixed the problem in the past. Today, it did not. Next, I tried generating to the C drive. Again, the same file (only one out of the three I modified) was missing from the build on the C drive. Last, I closed all applications, rebooted my machine, and generated again. This time, we agreed to send the output to the E drive again to figure out if the action of rebooting helped regardless of drive, and sure enough, the missing file was compiled correctly using the E drive.

During this testing of mine, shhimwriting had also made changes to several files in her project, generated, and had one missing file using the E drive. She simply rebooted, generated again, and the file was added back in to the output using the E drive without ever testing the C drive. So the act of rebooting seem to fix, even though she was always using her E drive.

Since the reboot seems to be helping, we did another test to see whether the recent reboot made a difference for an additional build. We both made changes for several topics in our separate Help files.

I tried generated to the C drive first this time (since we weren't sure if the fact that we initially generated to E last time was messing up the C drive test). This time, no topics were missing. So, that was good, but again, since our problem has not been consistent (files missing sometimes but not others), we didn't feel reassured that the problem is "fixed" per se. [In my other post, I mentioned that a few days ago, I had tried making changes and generating to deliberately reproduce the problem and could not - always using the E drive.]

Since shhimwriting had also made additional changes after her last build, she tried generating again. In her case, she built to the E drive as usual, and no files were missing.

Hopefully, I haven't totally confused you, but the bottom line is that we have seen files missing immediately after generating to C and E and files not missing immediately after generating to C and E.

The two of us have noticed some differences in our daily edit/save workflow, but since they don't seem to impact whether we have missing files or not (we each get the same results regardless of those specific differences), I won't complicate matters by sharing those right now.

Our theory at this point is that something about Windows or background processes is causing a glitch while RH 10 is trying to generate. It doesn't help that we have upgraded our entire operating system, RH, and screen capture tool all at the same time. There are so many things going on, it's hard to isolate what the issue is...

Let us know if you have any thoughts.

Thanks for wading through these notes!

RuWriter

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices