Has Anyone Encountered Issues Maintaining Linking Between RoboHelp and FrameMaker When Folders Have been Moved or Renamed?

[kkroeber]

Hi All,

For the past year I have been working with Adobe Tech Comm Suite to build an online help system that is authored in FrameMaker and linked to RoboHelp as the help generation system.

With the new year we switched to Tech Com Suite 2015 and  overhauled our doc folder structure. The RoboHelp project and associated FrameMaker files were moved together into a new set of folders.  Unfortunately this movement of files broke the file path linking between FrameMaker and RoboHelp in Tech Comm Suite 2015. 

The recommended solution that I found on the web is to right-click on the book file in RoboHelp, select Restore Link To FrameMaker File and browse to the new location of the missing FrameMaker book file, and then perform a Force Update All.  The end result is that all of the topics included in my RoboHelp-constructed Index and TOC vanish and the HTML content formatting is impacted .

No matter what I have done I cannot seem to find a solution to fix to maintain the integrity of the linked RoboHelp project and FrameMaker book files to work together in a proper manner as they did previously. 

I would appreciate hearing from anyone on the Adobe Forum -- FrameMaker Integration Community who has been through this problem before and has a solution of what needs to be done to get RoboHelp to recognize a FrameMaker book that has been moved to a new location and to properly update the contents of the TOC and Index accordingly (as well as the original formatting).  Those two tools can not be as unforgiving as they seem to be.  I must be missing something in setup (I hope anyway).

Thanks,

Kurt Kroeber

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Sorry, I am an Importer, not a Linker, but my understanding was that if you did a Force Update, unless you told parts of RH not to be updated, it would wipe & relink the content from FM. Usually, you create and update your Index & TOC in FM and then tell RH to use them. If you built both in RH after the content was linked, I’m not sure how you would expect it to be responsive to changes in FM content unless you rebuilt it in RH. As far as formatting is concerned, either you are employing the Matt Sullivan FM Template method or setting the RH styles to match the FM paragraph & character tags in your Conversion Settings.

[kkroeber]

Many thanks Jeff for the quick response.  I am not sure how you can control (tell) RoboHelp in what parts to force an update after linking to a newly moved book file.  There is no granularity in the selection.  I have used the Force Update All function in the past (when the original RoboHelp project was successfully linked to the imported FrameMaker book) and it worked flawlessly on changed FrameMaker content.  I would think that there would be a bulit-in flexibility in Tech Comm Suite 2015 to maintain the linked relationship between a RoboHelp project and the associated FrameMaker files no matter if the TOC and Index was generated from within RoboHelp using the FrameMaker topics.  It would be a nightmare to have to rebuild the TOC and Index everytime the files were moved to a new (or renamed) folder location.

[Willam_van_Weelden]

In the Project Manager, expand an FM file. Select the topic and open the properties. There should be an option to avoid updating.

Though I don't use this feature often, I have been struggeling in the past. My solution was to simply open the rhFrameDocs.apj file and manually update the links in that file. Then trash the CPD and open RoboHelp.

[kkroeber]

Thanks Willam for the suggestion.  Unfortunately updating is the only way to keep the files in sync between the RoboHelp project and the linked FrameMaker book and its files.

However, I believe that I may have found the (undocumented) solution to this problem.  I spent a number of hours on the phone yesterday with an extremely helpful Adobe Support representative working through the specifics of the behavior and trying a few different approaches.  After consulting with a few folks at Adobe he suggested that I perform the following sequence:

1.  Make a backup of the original (functioning) .hhc and .hhk files.

2. Replace the RoboHelp project files with a known good set of those files.

3. Open the project file, select Restore Link To FrameMaker File, browse to the new location of the missing FrameMaker book file, and then perform a Force Update All.

4. Once the update is completed create a new TOC and Index by pointing to the original hhc and .hhk files, then close the RoboHelp project

5. Copy the original hhc and .hhk files backinto the help project folder and repoen the RohoHelp project.

In general, the trick after restoring the link to the FrameMaker book file and forcing an update is to then replace the problematic versions of the hhc and .hhk files with a new TOC and IX that leverages the contents of the existing files.

I am still performing a few experiments to confirm that this solution is satisfactory before officially declaring victory but I do have a good feeling that this approach will work.  That said, is it not documented anywhere in the Abode RoboHelp documentation as guidance when renaming or moving a folder associated with a linked FrameMaker and RoboHelp project. 

I will share my final findings after I perform a few more tests with the files in the new folders.