Flare 2020 bugs and crashes

[stealth94rt]

When Flare 2020 was released, I installed that on my Windows 10 PC but also retained Flare 2019_R2.

Since doing that, every previous project that worked perfectly in Flare 2019_R2 runs into some type of bug or crash when I try to open it in Flare 2020. This is the most frustrating Flare upgrade that I've encountered, and I've been a full-time user of Flare since 2007. I've advised all of our content contributors to NOT upgrade to Flare 2020 until this gets resolved.

I'm wondering if it's just me (i.e., my PC) or are others running into issues like this? Are there conflicts between Flare 2020 and certain Windows 10 builds or other system-related conflicts?

Please advise. Thanks.

[ChoccieMuffin]

How often does 2020 crash when you open a 2019r2 project? Does it do it straight away or after some time, or after you do a certain thing?

I'm still mostly using 2019r2 to do actual work but I have opened existing 2019r1 projects and played with them without problems. What I DO need to do, though, is change import files in order to move over to 2020 but that would have been something you needed to do to get from 2019r1 to 2019r2 anyhow, so I don't think that'd be a problem for you.

[stealth94rt]

It happens in every Flare 2019_R2 project that I try to work on in Flare 2020.

[ChoccieMuffin]

It happens in every Flare 2019_R2 project that I try to work on in Flare 2020.

Then I think there may be something wrong specifically at your end, rather than a more general 2020 failure. If you have a maintenance agreement, raise a ticket with Tech Support (see my footer for raising a bug, I think that'd do it) and I'm sure they'll help out.

Some of the things they may advise first of all are:

* Delete \Analyzer and \Output folders from your projects before you try to open them.
* Check that you have the correct version of .NET installed.
* Uninstall and reinstall Flare.

If you've done those, then you will be doing the first things Tech Support will suggest so you'll be able to get down to resolving the problem more quickly. Good luck, and you never know, those three things above may even solve your problems! Let us know how you get on.

[stealth94rt]

I talked with tech support this morning and we ran a "Repair" on the Flare 2020 installation. That was about 2 hours ago, and it has been stable so far. I'm keeping my fingers (and toes) crossed that it is fixed now. I'll report back if there is (or not) continued success after a week or two of hard use.

[lorynj]

Flare 2020 has been pretty bullet-proof for me.

[SandraWitte]

I have encountered some issues and I am wondering if somebody has that too: I 've realised by chance that some formatting even in snippets doesn't look the same when published with Flare 2020. I did not change a thing but formatting in snippets where not honored, espacially linebreaks or paragraphs.
Did somebody has this issue too?

[NorthEast]

I have encountered some issues and I am wondering if somebody has that too: I 've realised by chance that some formatting even in snippets doesn't look the same when published with Flare 2020. I did not change a thing but formatting in snippets where not honored, espacially linebreaks or paragraphs.
Did somebody has this issue too?

That sounds like the snippets were accidentally inserted inline inside a paragraph as snippetText, instead of a snippetBlock. If they've been inserted as snippetText then they'll lose formatting. Although that's not different in 2020, and would be the same in previous versions of Flare.

[Nick A]

The Flare 2020 r2 update has introduced some irritating bugs in the Analyzer. A previously "clean" project in Flare 2019 is now reported as having many Undefined style errors, which are not styles at all. The Analyzer has started to misread perfectly valid variable entries, such as System.ChapterNumber in page layout files, and report them as "Undefined style: System002EChapterNumber". The project still builds perfectly as there is nothing wrong with the variable entries: they were inserted using Flare's menus, and have never previously displayed as an error. I cannot understand how the Analyzer can misinterpret a period (character 2E) unless there is a 1-byte/2-byte Unicode character code thing going on.

Even worse, a mass of spurious <span> tags have been generated around cross references and then reported as being "unknown styles" in the Analyzer. I did not create these spans or the classes that they reference, and they do not appear when opening the project in the original Flare 2020. I will be reporting both errors to Madcap and staying well clear of the r2 update!

[ChoccieMuffin]

The Flare 2020 r2 update has introduced some irritating bugs in the Analyzer. A previously "clean" project in Flare 2019 is now reported as having many Undefined style errors, which are not styles at all. The Analyzer has started to misread perfectly valid variable entries, such as System.ChapterNumber in page layout files, and report them as "Undefined style: System002EChapterNumber". The project still builds perfectly as there is nothing wrong with the variable entries: they were inserted using Flare's menus, and have never previously displayed as an error. I cannot understand how the Analyzer can misinterpret a period (character 2E) unless there is a 1-byte/2-byte Unicode character code thing going on.

Even worse, a mass of spurious <span> tags have been generated around cross references and then reported as being "unknown styles" in the Analyzer. I did not create these spans or the classes that they reference, and they do not appear when opening the project in the original Flare 2020. I will be reporting both errors to Madcap and staying well clear of the r2 update!

It's possible your Analyzer data has got corrupt, so try this.

Close Flare.
In the folder structure of your project, delete the \Analyzer folder.
Open the project again and see if the problem has gone away.

This regenerates the analysis from scratch and might be a solution for you. It's annoying that that database gets corrupted fairly easily, but good that the "fix" is quick and simple. Good luck!

[NorthEast]

NickA's problem is not a corrupt Analyzer database, it's a bug in Flare - I've already reported it and it was confirmed by MadCap.
Flare 2020R2 introduced variable styles, but the CSS it generates for variables includes a "002E" in the class name, and these are incorrectly reported as Undefined Styles.

BTW, the "002E" is a full stop (period), which are invalid in CSS, so they're replaced it with a "002E". To me it would seem easier to not use an invalid character in the first place, but hey ho.

[ChoccieMuffin]

NickA's problem is not a corrupt Analyzer database, it's a bug in Flare - I've already reported it and it was confirmed by MadCap.
Flare 2020R2 introduced variable styles, but the CSS it generates for variables includes a "002E" in the class name, and these are incorrectly reported as Undefined Styles.

BTW, the "002E" is a full stop (period), which are invalid in CSS, so they're replaced it with a "002E". To me it would seem easier to not use an invalid character in the first place, but hey ho.

Thanks for the clarification, Dave - a font of great knowledge, as always!

So does that mean that we can't use variable styles until that bug is fixed? (Not that I currently do but you never know, I might want to at some time.)

[NorthEast]

So does that mean that we can't use variable styles until that bug is fixed? (Not that I currently do but you never know, I might want to at some time.)

No, probably wasn't that clear - variable styles work fine and you can use them without any problems.

The bug is that Analyzer's Undefined Styles list is incorrectly reporting any valid styles that you have set up for variables (in 2020R2). So in practice, if you use variables a lot like me, then you may have thousands of false positives!