Broken links that are not broken

[Gary Niemen]

[Copied over from Analyzer forum to get more exposure.]

We are getting odd behaviour from Analyzer 2.1. It is selecting a bunch of broken links and when we investigate the links are there and they work fine. We have checked behind in the code and there are no hidden broken links there. We have also reset the links and re-run Analyzer - and the same broken ones appear as broken. Again, we test the links and they work fine. They work fine within Analyzer, within Flare, and in the published output. So, of course, this is not a showstopper - but at the same time it is harder for us to find the real broken links because they are surrounded by ones that are not broken. We have tried removing the Analyzer folder and it doesn't help. Has anyone else had this or seen this? Any idea what is going on or how to solve the issue?

[NorthEast]

Yep, I've got this problem in one of my projects, it reports hundreds of broken links and over a thousand database errors. I've tried deleting the Analyzer folder and letting it scan again, but with no success.

It seemed to happen after I installed the Flare 4.1 and Analyzer 2.1 updates, but I'm not sure if it's related to one or the other, or both. I raised a support request.

[NorthEast]

MadCap support helped find the problem in my project. One of the topics in the project contained a copy of the contents of the alias file. I've absolutely no idea how that happened though, which is slightly worrying.

[Gary Niemen]

Okay, thanks for adding that to the forum. I'll investigate.

[Gary Niemen]

I fix the broken links (the ones that are not really broken) and they disappear from the Analyzer (2.1) broken links list. Then, the next time Analyzer runs, they are back. Plus, we now have a lot of TOC links that have suddently appeared on the list as broken - and they are not broken either (in reality). This is getting quite frustrating and is costing us a lot of time. We have tried deleting the Analyzer folder. One clue: We also have 72 errors with category Other - supposedly Database Errors.
The description for each is as follows - or rather the line starts as follow:
Attribute: @Value: String truncation: max=4000, len=4155, value='F1;g;EUR; etc etc etc
The full description line is very very long.
Any more ideas from anybody?

[Gary Niemen]

Okay - mystery solved. Just reporting back.
We had 72 database errors because of 72 topics that had a list of 'Ignored words' (in the code) that exceeded the maximum of 4000 characters. Any hyperlinks going to any of these topics were reported as broken.
What I don't understand is how 72 topics out of a total of more than a 1000 topics ended up with the same massive list of 'ignored words'. Yes we have used the spell checker, yes we have used the Ignore functionality, but not to this extent and not the same on 72 topics.
Anyway, never mind - problem solved.

[NorthEast]

I think the Ignore in All Files option adds the ignored word to the header in all topics in your project, whereas Ignore just adds the word to the current topic. It's good to know there's a potential issue with the length of the ignored words list in the header, it may be best to add the words to the dictionary file instead.

[Gary Niemen]

Yes I thought of that Ignore All Files. But wouldn't it add to all files in the project - whereas in our case it was just 72 topics that were affected out of a total of 100s of topics in the project.

[NorthEast]

I gave it a quick test, and when you click Ignore in All files it adds the term to all of the master page headers, not the topics.
And if you select Add to dictionary, it also adds the term as an ignored word in the topic's header.

Hmmm... I'm more confused now.

[KevinDAmery]

Were any of the topics brought in from another project?

Another thought: are you using source control? If you are, then any operation in Flare that added ignored words would only "work" on files that were checked out at the time. Files that weren't checked out would be read-only.

[RamonS]

Any chance that these 72 topics were the first ones to get treated with the ignore? If yes, it may just be that the first round of ignorance loaded the topics up to the rim. Just wildly guessing....

[Gary Niemen]

It could well have been that I think.

[wijnand]

I once had this problem in Flare 4.1 and apparantly it means there is something in your analyser database thats causing this corruption. Remove the Analyser folder from your flare project and let it rebuild. It should remove a lot of the hyperlinks that were "broken"

I had this with a customer who had moved the project often and overwritten Analyser database files with different ones. It might be the same problem your currently having.Otherwise open the topic in notepad and see if there is a link being made at the spot analyser is screaming about.