The RoboColum(n)

From time to time those of us who have nothing better to do than frequent the RoboHelp forums, see posts from stressed out users who have been vainly attempting to delete a folder. The folder appears empty when viewed inside RoboHelp but whatever they do they just can’t seem to get rid of the blighter. The Delete command isn’t even available. What gives?

The bottom line is that if RoboHelp believes there is content inside the folder that said folder is still being used. This means you until you find and remove the reference the folder will remain from whence it came in all its wonderful, radiant glory. Such a reference could be somewhere inside a topic pointing to something inside the folder. It could also be an image, a CSS file, multimedia file, map file or baggage file.

“OK that describes the problem. Now how can I solve it?” you may ask. Simple! Remove the references! But before you do so, take heed. Just because a folder has no topics in it does not mean it is empty. How can this be?

Take a look inside your RoboHelp project containing multiple folders and you’ll find the folder hierarchy duplicated in the topics, images, multimedia, style sheets and baggage files sections. This is easily represented in earlier RoboHelp versions (up to RoboHelp 6) by expanding these sections in the Project tab. Later versions (RoboHelp 7 and 8) still display these folders but they are groups together in different pods. For example topics and baggage files are groups together in the same pod.

So the rub is that even if a folder has no topic, it may have a reference somewhere to another file that RoboHelp still thinks is being used. What you have to do is go in search for it. Look through the folders or use a good find and replace tool. Once you have found it, remove the reference and you will now be able to live a stress free existence once more.

Footnote

I am seen occasions where a folder has been created (e.g. to store images created from RoboScreenCapture) and files have been added to it. Later redundant files are deleted from Windows Explorer and it is expected that the folder can be deleted from inside RoboHelp. In such instances, RoboHelp knows nothing about the file deletions as the last time it was used they were referenced somewhere. Think of it like time travel. If you woke up one day in 1540 in the court of King Henry VIII of England you’d sure be pretty disorientated. The bottom line is never delete files from Windows Explorer unless they are referenced by RoboHelp’s own Unused Files report.