Skip to main content

Azure DevOps–Export wiki to PDF

If you ever want to export your Azure DevOps wiki, you can use the AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport tool.

  • Start by cloning your Azure DevOps wiki to a local folder.

Troubleshooting

While executing the tool I encountered some issues so here are some troubleshooting tips.

Tip 1 – Ignore the Qt: Could not initialize OLE (error 80010106) warning

If you see a Qt: Could not initialize OLE (error 80010106) warning while executing the tool, don’t worry. You can just ignore this message.

Tip 2 – Be aware about the .order file

The first time I executed the tool only a few of my wiki pages were included. I found out that this was the case because when it detects a .order file it will only include the pages mentioned inside the .order file.

So make sure that all wiki pages are mentioned inside the .order file.

Tip 3 – Specify the ‘—attachments-path’ when your wiki pages include images

When trying to export a wiki page containing images it failed with the following error message:

C:\example\Docs>azuredevops-export-wiki

    WARN: Removing Table of contents [[_TOC_]] from pdf

ERR: Something bad happend.

System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. (Parameter 'path1')

   at System.IO.Path.Combine(String path1, String path2)

   at azuredevops_export_wiki.WikiPDFExporter.CorrectLinksAndImages(MarkdownObject document, FileInfo file, MarkdownFile mf) in D:\Git\WikiPDFExport\AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport\WikiPDFExporter.cs:line 674

   at azuredevops_export_wiki.WikiPDFExporter.ConvertMarkdownToHTML(List`1 files) in D:\Git\WikiPDFExport\AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport\WikiPDFExporter.cs:line 497

   at azuredevops_export_wiki.WikiPDFExporter.Export() in D:\Git\WikiPDFExport\AzureDevOps.WikiPDFExport\WikiPDFExporter.cs:line 149

To fix this error I had to include the ‘--attachments-path’ option and explicitly specify the location of the images:

C:\example\Docs>azuredevops-export-wiki --attachments-path C:\example\Docs\.attachments

Tip 4 – Use the –h option for a good TOC

The tool doesn’t support the TOC (Table of Contents) tag and will be removed from the pdf. As a workaround you can use the ‘-h’ option to create a heading for every wiki page in the PDF file. This doesn’t replace this feature but already helps to make your PDF more accessible.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more