How to: Validate Help Collection Installation
To validate the integrity of your Microsoft Windows Installer (.msi) files, a set of Help internal consistency evaluators (ICEs) are provided. These custom actions scan the installer database for entries in records that are valid when examined individually, but that might cause incorrect behavior in the context of the whole database.
Note
Help-specific ICEs are prepended with the prefix ICEH.
To run the Help-specific Installer ICEs
Open the Orca database editor.
Note
Registration uses a merge module editing utility named Orca (Orca.exe), which is available as part of the Windows Installer SDK. The Windows Installer SDK can be installed from the MSDN Download Center https://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads. Search for "Orca" on the site to locate the latest download of the Windows Installer SDK.
On the File menu of Orca, click Open, and browse to your .msi file.
If you do not have an .msi file, complete the Walkthrough: Registering and Integrating a Help Collection By Using Windows Installer topic.
On the Tools menu in Orca, click Validate.
The Validation Output dialog box appears.
In the Evaluation File box, click Help Installation Validation, and click Go.
The ICEs run on your database, and a list of errors is displayed. In Orca, cells that contain errors are marked in red. To get more information about a particular error, right-click a marked entry, and select Errors.
To specify one or more ICEs to run individually
In the ICEs to Run field of the Validation Output dialog box, type a list of ICE names separated by colons.
For example, ICEH02:ICEH09:ICEH12 would only run 2, 9, and 12.
To save the error log
Click Copy Results in the Validation Output dialog box to copy the error list to the clipboard.
Paste the error list into a text file or an Excel spreadsheet file.
By default, the .cub file, which contains the custom actions required to run the ICEs is located at <drive>:Program Files\Microsoft Help 2.0 SDK\Unsupported Tools\HelpIce.cub.
The following table shows each ICE and briefly describes its function.
ICE
Function
ICEH01
Verifies the validity of the LangID entries in the HelpFile table.
ICEH02
Verifies that the files in the HelpFile table are valid references to the File table.
ICEH03
Verifies that namespaces in the HelpFileToNamespace table are valid references to the HelpNamespace table.
ICEH04
Verifies that all File_HxS file entries in the HelpFile table are associated only with namespaces that they are mapped to (as part of a feature, or subfeature, of each respective namespace).
ICEH05
Verifies that each HelpFile table entry has a unique HelpFileKey.
ICEH06
Verifies that each entry in the HelpFile table is mapped to a namespace in the HelpFileToNamespace table.
ICEH07
Verifies that HelpFile_ entries in the HelpFileToNamespace table are valid references to the HelpFile table.
ICEH08
Verifies that all namespaces have at least one Help file mapped to them.
ICEH09
Verifies that each HelpNamespace entry has a unique HelpNamespaceKey.
ICEH10
Verifies that the File_Collection entries in the HelpNamespace table are valid references to the File table.
ICEH11
Verifies that the HelpNamespace_ and HelpNamespace_Parent entries in the HelpPlugin table refer to valid namespaces in the Namespace table.
ICEH12
Verifies that the File_HxT and File_HxA entries in the HelpPlugin table are valid references to the File table.
ICEH13
Verifies that all entries in the HelpFilter table are mapped to a namespace in the HelpFilterToNamespace table.
ICEH14
Verifies that all entries in the HelpFilterToNamespace table have valid references to the HelpFilter table.
ICEH15
Verifies that all entries in the HelpFilterToNamespace table have valid references to the HelpNamespace table.
ICEH16
Verifies that each File_HxS in the HelpFile table is in at least one feature or subfeature of each namespace File_Collection to which it is mapped in the HelpFileToNamespace table. If a circular feature hierarchy is found for a namespace, the namespace is skipped, an error is reported, and the check continues on the next item.