ITauthor

A little tip for users of Madcap Flare who find that things are getting very … very … very … s – l – o – w …

Your problem may be that the Flare database for your project has got messed up in some way. The symptoms of this are that you can be typing in the editor but no characters are showing up, then, after you wait a few seconds they appear, so you go on typing, but then things slow up again.

Flare uses a Microsoft SQL Server database to keep track of the interconnections between topics. This helps prevent you screwing things up when you delete a topic – because Flare will ask you what you want to do about all the references to that topic and will convert all the hyperlinks to normal text, if that’s what you want to do.

To repair a messed up database:

1. Save your work.
2. Close the project and Flare.
3. In Windows Explorer, go to the Analyzer subdirectory for the project.
   
   
4. Delete the files in this directory.
5. Restart Flare and load the project.
   
   Flare will rebuild the database. This will take a few minutes, depending on the size of the project – during which time you’ll see lots of activity in Flare’s status bar – but once it’s done you should have a nice speedy Flare again.

The other things you can do to speed up Flare a little are:

• Disable phrase collecting (choose Tools > Options > Analyzer and remove the selection from the check box). This turns off the phrase suggestions that you see in the Intellisense popups (if you have that turned on). If you don’t use this, turn it off.
• Turn off Intellisense all together (choose Edit > Intellisense and remove the selection of Enable Intellisense). Personally, I found this feature annoying rather than useful, so I prefer to have it turned off anyway.