RoboHelp 2015 - batch generate with conditional build tags broken?

[Ioana_St]

Hello everyone.

My company recently upgraded to Technical Communication Suite 2015 and today we're trying to generate online help for the first time with RoboHelp 2015. We've been batch generating (rhcl.exe) for about a year with no issues... and today I'm having big conditional build tag problems. I'll try to be as detailed as I can, in the hope that the community can tell me if I'm doing something wrong.

System: RoboHelp 2015 on Windows 7 64-bit. WebHelp layout. Project upgraded from RH 11 a week ago.

Project Setup

In most topics we have a "See Also" section at the end, with a couple of links. This section is tagged with the "Online" CBT (so that we can exclude it from the PDF output).

There are 4-5 CBT per module.

My conditional build expression is: NOT Print AND NOT risque AND NOT WIP. The expression is named Test. This conditional build expression is saved in a WebHelp SSL called VALUE. The "Online" tag is correctly displayed under available tags and it's definitely not excluded.

The problem

I use the following command;

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 2015\RoboHTML\rhcl.exe" "D:\technical_documentation\my_project\my_project.xpj" -l "Test" -o "D:\help_builds\my_master\mergedProjects\my_project"

In the output, all content that is tagged with Online is not visible, even though the tag was not excluded!

I tried a couple more scenarios and the results are even more confusing to me. I tagged some random text with some other tags ("link", "afds" and "value") - the content tagged with "link" and "afds" is not visibile, but the content tagged with "value" is... even though none of these tags were excluded!

If I generate from RoboHelp, not with the batch, everything works fine, with no changes in SSL settings.

Am I correct in thinking this is a new bug? Maybe rhcl.exe does not correctly support the conditional build tag enhancements in RH 2015? I will log a bug if that is the case, but I'd like some opinions first Thanks!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

For starters, please know that I'm only "command line AWARE" and have never used it.

In the command line parameters, are you able to supply a layout name? It would seem to me that this would be the logical way to fly. Create a Single Source Layout that does exactly what you want, then supply that layout name as one of the parameters.

Cheers... Rick

[Ioana_St]

Yup, that's what the -l parameter does. So I am giving it my SSL as a parameter, except the conditional build tag settings get ignored... This command was working last week, in RH 11 - the only change since then was recreating the conditional build expression and giving it a name per the new functionality. Oh, and this happens for all ~40 modules in our documentation set, for both me and another coworker.

[Peter Grainge]

Have you tried a simple expression just excluding one build tag, just to rule out some complication?

I am trying to find out if anyone else has run into this problem.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Ioana_St]

I'll try tomorrow at work, I did a lot of testing, but I can't remember if I tried with just one build tag. (I did try with no conditional expression set in the SSL and that worked.)

[Ioana_St]

Peter,

Thanks for the help! (Now and in the past )

I'm back at work and testing some more.

I'm going to use one topic in particular for my tests, the structure is something like this (the CBT names between angled brackets]:

[no tag] Content [/no tag]

[Online] Some links here [/Online]

[Risque] Image1 [/Risque]

[Value] Image2 [/Value]

Test 1

Name of expression: exp_test

Excluded: WIP (This CBT is not used in the test topic.)

Result: Links and images not visible. (not expected)

Test 2

Name of expression: exp_test

Excluded: Online

Result: Links not visible (expected), images not visible (not expected).

(Couple more tests with various combinations of exclusion - no tagged content is visible.)

And then it gets curiouser and curiouser.

Test 3

Name of expression: exp_test

Excluded: Print, Risque, WIP

Result: No tagged content is visible.

But then...

Test 4

Name of expression: Value

Excluded: Print, Risque, WIP (same as above)

Result: Image 2 (tagged with Value) is visible.

So I figured I'm on to something.

Test 5

Name of expression: Online

Excluded: Online, Value

Result: Links (tagged with Online) are included. All images (tagged with Value and Risque) are excluded.

I will stop here because we have a release today, but if you need to me to run some more tests (on a sample module or anything else), let me know. I have also asked someone supporting a different product (so, different online help system) to run the same tests.

It seems to me like rhcl.exe is picking up the name of the expression instead of the CBT in the expression, and that's what's mucking things up. Which, unfortunately, is a big deal for us - using a batch saved us a couple of hours of manually generating projects...

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

Adobe have investigated this problem and been able to reproduce it.

I suggest you report it as a bug so that Adobe can contact you if they need further information.

Please follow this link.

http://www.Adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=38

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Ioana_St]

Thanks! I'll report the bug.

[Amebr]

In the sample command line you posted the -l command specifies "Test". Should that be "Value" to match the SSL name you mentioned? Might just be a typo introduced on the forum, but thought it worth checking.

"My conditional build expression is: NOT Print AND NOT risque AND NOT WIP. The expression is named Test. This conditional build expression is saved in a WebHelp SSL called VALUE. The "Online" tag is correctly displayed under available tags and it's definitely not excluded."

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 2015\RoboHTML\rhcl.exe" "D:\technical_documentation\my_project\my_project.xpj" -l "Test" -o "D:\help_builds\my_master\mergedProjects\my_project"

[Ioana_St]

Amebr,

Yes, that's my mistake, sorry! My SSL was called VALUE initially, and I thought there might be a problem because the layout and the expression had the same name, so I renamed the SSL to Test... and then I replaced the wrong names in the forum post I was writing. Either way, the problem is there regardless of the names.