Script errors in chm help on windows 7

[Ray Rippey]

I have one customer (of course I was doing a demo and this happened)... when I clicked on help in my software the help came up, but with a scripting error... no matter what screen or help screen I was on. I could ignore it but no graphics showed up.

Of course it works fine on my Win8.1 computer.... any idea if there could be a program on the customers computer that would interfere?

Thank you.

Ray

[Tim Green]

Hi Ray,

What exactly was the error? That's important, because different errors can have different causes. It's unlikely that the error is not happening on your system as well -- you have probably just configured Internet Explorer to not display script errors automatically. If you go to Internet Options in IE and turn on "Display a notification for every script error" in the Advanced tab then you will probably see the error as well.

The most likely cause is using an outdated template or skin in Help & Manual 7, or possibly an orphaned toggle link (although that would only come up on specific pages). There is probably an "orphaned" toggle link somewhere on the page that is causing errors in the output. An orphaned toggle link is one that does not have a matching table to toggle, and when the script on the page tries to initialize it then fails. You need to locate these orphaned toggles and delete them to eliminate the problem.

If there are orphaned toggles, information about them are displayed in the compiler log displayed after you publish. This will show you the text of the caption of the orphaned toggle link that should allow you to locate it on the page. Then just right-click on it and select "Convert to plain text" to fix the problem.

If you can't find the orphaned toggles they may not have captions at all, which makes it more difficult. It means that you accidentally managed to delete the caption of the toggle link without deleting the link (a single space character probably remained when this happened). This may have happened a while ago, because it is much more difficult to do this in the current version of HM.

[Ray Rippey]

Tim,

I changed IE like you suggested and clicked on all topics.. no errors. I'll have our team check out all customers help files to see if anyone else has this problem. I'll check with my Clarion newsgroups to see if anyone else has run into this... now if I can just figure out who that customer was and find the exact error... then I'll report back here.

Thanks,

Ray
VMT Software

[Tim Green]

Hi Ray,

The Windows version and version of IE could also be important here. The CHM viewer uses the IE rendering engine and all the IE settings, and errors can be caused both by outdated IE versions and restrictive settings. Sometimes security policies can make some CHM files unusable, for example. It is also possible for the runtime components needed to display CHMs to be corrupted or misconfigured -- this can happen occasionally without any human intervention (go figure). It would be important to check whether there are problems with other CHM files as well.