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I have discovered something that very nearly caused serious damage to my project. I ran an analysis on a project of about 350 topics. I received a result saying that approximately 30 topics were "unused". In my interpretation that is like having images that aren't referenced anywhere, so just delete them. Bad idea!

Unused topics in Analyzer can include topics that link out to other topics, but aren't lnked to. In this specific project I make context sensitive calls from the application to these 30 topics, and these topics link into other parts of the Help file, but they aren't linked to and they aren't in the TOC or index. Deleting them would have seriously affected the functionality of the application --- so be cerafull. Ideally Analyzer should not regards these as unused topics.

Robin

Hi Robin,

Make sure you lodge a bug report on this one!

I understand the confusion, but then what does constitute an unused help topic? In order to really analyze this exactly the application code needs to be evaluated. Maybe calling these topics "unreferenced topics" may be better than "unused".

Just out of curiosity, do you have these topics mapped in the alias file? I don't use CSH calls using the alias and IDs, but I'm curious as to whether Analyzer sees that mapping and identifies the topic as being used?

Ok, I have reported this as an issue.

No, we do not have any MAP IDs on the topics. Basically it's a project imported frm X5 and the application uses URLs with specific HTML file names, so we didn't want to update the app. - that may change though.

Robin

I'm not sure I agree. To Flare these topics will appear to be unused, as the user cannot navigate to them in the help system. The fact they have outward links isn't that important.
The way you're displaying them is to link to them directly (not using Flare's CSH), so how would Flare know that they're "used"?

I wouldn't like this feature to change, I want Flare to tell me about topics that aren't linked to - that's the fundamental characteristic of redundant topics in my projects.

That is why I think that adjusting the wording may satisfy both sides, although I didn't get the impression as that there was really a full intention to have this feature removed.

Well, it's been reported as an issue. I disagree that there's a problem with the way the feature works, it's more the way it was used.

Analyzer can only do so much. You have to decide whether the topics that it thinks are unused should be deleted or not, so if you delete them without checking first then it's your own fault.