Freezing with non-existing linked snippet

[rexpart]

Hello, if a master project contains a topic which contains linked snippet to an xml topic file from another project and this topic file becomes unavailable (deleted, renamed), H&M freezes after you click on the topic with the linked snippet in TOC of the master project. The only option is to kill helpman.exe manually. If you don't click on this topic in the master project and run the publishing process directly, H&M will freeze during compilation. Hope I was clear enough with this description .

Version: 5.4.0 Build 1173

[Tim Green]

Thanks for reporting this, we'll look into it. By the way: Your installation is out of date, you should download the current build, which is 5.4 Build 1201.

[Tim Green]

Hi Rex,

We can't reproduce this. Do is the snippet file you are linking to on a network drive? If this is the case, and if the network resource being referred to is not currently available, then it's a Windows problem, not a Help & Manual problem. What is happening is that Windows takes a very long time to resolve references to network resources that can't be found. It can then look as though something has frozen, even though it hasn't really. If you wait -- sometimes this takes several minutes -- you will find that Help & Manual returns to normal after a while.

There's nothing that can be done about this, because the problem is really in Windows. It just takes a very long time to "release" if you try to reference a network resource that isn't available.

[rexpart]

Hi Tim,
the issue with network drive was the first thing I checked out. This problem, however, occurs on a local disk too. I've sent you a test project in a private email where you can observer this behaviour. There is one master project - emsx - with topics with linked snippets to the second project - ess. To reproduce this problem, rename or delete the INSTALLATION_TYPICAL topic from the ess project, for example, and try to access this topic in the emsx project.
Rexpart

[Tim Green]

Hi Rexpart,

The problem was that your project included its own /Topics folder in its project search path, as the last entry in the path list. If a snippet file could not be found this caused a search in the project's own /Topics folder, and it seems that this caused a circular reference. We're looking into it, but you can solve it very easily: Just remove the project's own /Topics folder from the path.

[rexpart]

Hi Tim,
thanks, that makes sense. It seems that leaving out the project's own folder from the project search path has no negative impact on the project. Now the missing linked snippets generate regular error (without freezing). Anyway, it might worth to solve this problem by some error warning instead of freezing. Thanks.
Rexpart