Help & Manual Forums

How do most of you check for broken links in browser-based help files?

I have several large, complex webhelp projects that are not published on the web, but are installed with the software. What is the best way for me to check my links?

TIA,

Suzette Leeming

Hi Suzette,

Are you referring to links to external files or links within your project? You can check for broken links within your project with the Project Report tool in the Project tab.

Hi Suzette,

If you double-click on a web link in the H&M editor, the link-edit dialog will open, which has a Test button:
regards,

Martin.

I am referring to external links I think. I have several help systems, and sometimes a topic in one will refer to a topic in another help file.

In those situations, the Test button doesn't work for me locally - I need to generate the help, have our code librarian upload it, then I can test it.

Maybe in my situation there isn't really a way to check my links locally.

Thanks anyway.

Hi Suzette,

There isn't any way to test links like that locally because they aren't valid until they are "live" -- and even if they did work locally there would be no guarantee that they would also work in the actual runtime envioronment.

We have a work around for that problem. All our files are built with H&M and then we use Dreamweaver to check in our files from our personal computers to a remote server. The reason we do this is because we started out with Dreamweaver and have been slowly but surely migrating over to H&M-generated documents. The cool thing about checking in all our files to Dreamweaver, however, is that we can run a report of all broken links.

I am also facing the same problem, Many thanks for sharing this.