Bulk update for topic titles?

[TR Lisa]

I've inherited a project with 848 field help topics that all have the same topic title, "Topic Help". This is not pretty in search results. Not all topics have headings. All do have boilerplate text above the topic text that is hard wired (not template text) in the topic. Any way to update topic titles in bulk or do I really have to open 848 topics one at a time and change the titles?

Excluding these topics from search results is not a great option as they contain content our customers are especially fond of.

[GregStenhouse]

If you use H1 to H6 in the topic, and are happy to use that for the topic title, then use Search and Replace / Find in source code / Regular Expressions to remove all topics titles for your project.

Flare will then use the heading in the topic to auto-populate the title in the generated help.

[TR Lisa]

Unfortunately the only heading style in these topics is applied to a generic string like "Topic Help", which is also the topic title. This is essentially what's causing the mess in search results. Pages of "Topic Help" listings in the search results. So it doesn't seem that using existing headings for topic titles is an option. And this is just one folder in my very large project. It's only for field help topics, which have their own skin and template. I'm afraid that, given the inconsistent application and non-application of heading styles in these topics, I may be stuck with manual topic title updates x 848 . Still hoping there is a better way though!

[devjoe]

You can still use Greg's idea to remove the topic titles, and then when you go to make the headings sensible, the titles will automatically update to your new headings instead of being another manual step you need to do in each of your hundreds of topics.

[TR Lisa]

So I'd still need to open and manually add a heading-styled title to each topic, just not open Topic Properties for each, right? I can try that. There is other boilerplate clutter at the top of each topic that I think will get sucked in as the search results heading if I don't delete it or add the new title as a heading. I've tried deleting that clutter with the same regular expression f/r logic but it doesn't seem to like it. For the life of me I don't understand why the boilerplate clutter is in every topic and not in a template or master page.

[devjoe]

Yes, that's right. I hope you can find a solution for that boilerplate material also; a master page and/or other features in Flare is usually the right way to do that. It makes me wonder if that help was imported from the output of some other system where there wasn't any other import option in Flare.

I had to import a help system from a company we acquired whose product was written in Python and the help was written using a Python doc package that used a bunch of wiki-style markup text files as source for output that looks like the Python documentation web site. Great, if you are writing a tool meant for other Python developers (not the case here), or if all your software is in Python (not the case for us, and we wanted the help to look similar to all our other products' help). The only sensible import mechanism was to import the output HTML files, which had a bunch of divs in every topic implementing boilerplate navigation links and a per-topic TOC similar to Flare top-nav output. I had to eliminate all that stuff and just keep the contents of each topic's main body div. Fortunately, since it was generated from some other system, the boilerplate stuff was consistent.

[TR Lisa]

This help project was rebuilt from output after a previous author deleted all of the source files. And before that was maintained by many different people and then by no people for a long time. I'm just trying to keep it alive and halfway usable while I build a new one. It's complicated...