Somehow, I ended up with a few help topics missing from a set of RoboHelp source files today. Subversion had removed them, and RoboHelp didn’t know where they were. I haven’t solved the case of how that happened, and at this point I don’t really care, because Subversion allowed me to fix the problem.

When I discovered that the topics were missing, I knew the wrong thing to do would be to import the corresponding output files. For WebHelp, RH inserts JavaScript and possibly other code into each topic in the output, and if you import an output topic, you have to deal with stripping out that extra code so it isn’t duplicated later.

I keep the files for this particular project with the designer’s prototype repository, and I keep a set of the prototypes on my hard drive so that I can access them without a connection if necessary. The set of files I actively work from are outside that folder on my hard drive. To solve the problem, I looked at the Subversion log for the last revision before the files were deleted.

Hey, that’s what version control is for.

When I found that revision, I pulled it down and then imported those topics back into my open project. Bingo, RH accepted them, and everything looks good again. Fortunately, they weren’t topics that I changed recently. As far as I know, those three topics don’t really have anything in common, other than they were in the same folder. But there were probably over a dozen other topics that this didn’t happen to. So I’m stumped. The important thing is that I know how to solve this problem if it rears its head again.

Of course, thanks to version control, I can check the log to see if I was the one who deleted them or not…

Related posts (auto-generated):

  1. Tech Tip: Checking WebHelp/FlashHelp Output Files in to Subversion
  2. FlashHelp Tech Tip: Removing IE's "Click to activate and use this control" Message
  3. Styles in Inches and Points Improve RH-to-Word Output
  4. Long Help Topics: A Help Author's Crime against Humanity
  5. FlashHelp Tech Tip: Fixing the "Flash Player has stopped a potentially unsafe operation" Problem