Madcap Flare: Mother knows best!
March 20th, 2009
Don’t you just hate it when software tries to be helpful but just gets in the way?
I’m currently working on tidying up a migration of RoboHelp into Flare. I’ve got to say immediately that Flare does an excellent job of migrating RoboHelp projects – but only if you’ve only used RoboHelp from within it’s GUI and never gone and tinkered with the HTML or added your own Javascript.
Huh! What are the chances of that?
Any help project from a few years ago that was built in RoboHelp will definitely and certainly have some tweaking and augmenting to it – or it will look like rubbish and be clunky and unsophisticated. Things might be different in the current version of RoboHelp, I don’t know, I don’t have it – but previous versions of RoboHelp had some serious shortcomings that forced you into a bit of roll-your-own behaviour just in order to get things looking and working the way you wanted.
The trouble is, once you do a migration into Flare, none of this is handled for you. I’m not complaining about that. The guys at Madcap have no way of knowing what extra goodness you layered on top of your plain old RoboHelp projects. And fortunately, most of the time, Flare just leaves any stuff you added by hand. That way you can do what I’ve been doing over the past few days: you can run some crafty regex search/replaces to go and convert those things into something that’ll work in Flare.
Unfortunately though, the philosophy of “if you don’t understand it, don’t touch it” hasn’t been extended to the TOC processing. The TOCs in the projects I’ve been migrating use anchor names at the end of topic file names, to pass a value to a redirect file, which then sends the browser off to display the appropriate page. Why would you want to do that then, I hear you ask. Well it’s a nice little Rob Chandler trick that allows you to decide which entry in the TOC gets highlighted where there are multiple TOC refs to the same topic. If you don’t use this method, the TOC will always jump to the first reference to the topic.
After some laborious debugging I’ve discovered that, at build time, Flare is taking my TOC file, seeing references such as redirect.file#sometopic and stripping off the anchor. So, within the generated .chm the reference is just redirect.file, which results in no redirection happening because the Javascript never finds out where to redirect to.
Flare does the same with query strings, like redirect.file?param=value. Annoying! Very annoying! It’s like when you were a kid and your mother tidied up your bedroom and chucked out your favourite comic. “Well it was lying on the floor. How was I to know it was important?”
Potentially similar posts
- Adding function buttons to the Madcap Flare WebHelp toolbar – January 2010
- Putting the flare back into a sluggish Flare – December 2009
- Overcoming hard-coded styles in Madcap Flare – December 2009
- Test a help topic without recompiling – December 2008
- Fixing Search in Flare HTML Help – July 2008
