Renaming files/folders causes innumerable broken links

[gotm]

Hi.

I had to rename files/folders in my HTML Help project to be without any spaces so that the Previous/Next buttons would work.

Needless to say, upon renaming a file I'd select to "Update Links." That seemed to happen, and after each rename the files went through some sort of scan (visible in the status bar), and everything seemed to be fine. But then I compiled the project and Holy Cow! There were so many errors that Flare gave up displaying them "for performance reasons." This was not good.

During the process I also renamed all the folders to be without spaces (in the Content Explorer, of course).

I've had this happen with two or three links, but this astronomical number of broken links took me three days to resolve.

Why?

Cindy

[jmenning]

I run into this, too, and it drives me nuts. It's gotten to the point where I don't rename anything unless it's absolutely essential - I'll deal with misleading or incorrect file names rather than hunt down all the broken links that result from renaming. When I do have to rename files, I'll rename or move the files in a single folder, then run Analyzer to find and fix all those broken links, then do the next group.

This is not new - I've been seeing it since v.1. I reported this problem to Madcap, and sent them my project, but haven't heard anything back from them on it.

[KevinDAmery]

Hmm, the weird thing about this is I've done the same thing in version 2.0 and 3.1, and it worked. Like Cindy, I had to remove spaces to make the Previous / Next buttons work, but I had no trouble with the links or with errors after I finished.

Not sure what to suggest, under the circumstances.

[dmaiorana]

May I ask if these projects were originally imported from Frame?
I have had no problems renaming files, removing spaces, moving files into different folders, etc., in multiple versions of Flare, until now, when we began moving files in a project imported from Frame into folders rather than leaving them all under "Content." We select yes to update links and they appear to be updated but the result is all or mostly broken links, project generation errors, and inability to report on the full list of errors.

I did find one other post about this being a problem with files imported from Frame. Perhaps this is the missing link that Madcap needs to rectify the problem. I am interested to hear if yours started in Frame.

[jmenning]

I've had this problem both with projects imported from RoboHelp and with projects started from scratch in Flare. I see it more frequently in projects with large numbers of topics (100+) but I've seen it a couple of times even in smaller projects.

[Andrew]

I've moved files around in groups of 25-50 (any more than that and, at the time, Flare would crash...but this was back in v2), and I occasionally encountered a broken link or two afterward.

I've renamed plenty of files, and never seen this. My project has a topic count well into the thousands, and was converted from RoboHelp X5.