Pushing templates to Flare

[JimOfRoseville]

Hello everyone,
Please forgive my ignorance. I'm not an actual Flare user, but I work with a team that does use flare.

I'm a web programmer. And I've been tasked with creating an intranet tool whereby a user can assemble data pieces, press a button, and whammo! bata bing!, templates are now available in their Flare instance. This would require a service API that is ready, listening for such an import, and/or access to data tables where the pertinent data can be imported... or whatever. I know enough to know that while inside of Flare you can import templates. I'm actually asking for the reverse of this... where an app pushes templates into Flare.

I'm not sure what to call this functionality, if it exists as a service, or how to interact with the API (that is if it exists as such).

All I'm asking is for some direction into the correct thing to look into. From there I should be able to find the correct tutorials or manuals that will allow me to write this utility.

Thank you in advance,
Jim

[Daniel Ferguson]

Hi Jim,

If I'm understanding your requirement correctly, I think this might be quite simple.

Flare saves topic templates in user-defined template folders. When a user is creating a new topic, Flare scans the template folders and presents their files as templates available for the user to select. So in your case, you could have all your Flare users define a standard template folder on their hard drives (say c:\Flare Templates). Then, all your tool would need to do is generate a valid Flare XHTML file and copy that file into the user's c:\Flare Template folder, and it is immediately available. No restarts, reboots or anything.

Flare users designate template folders by going to the Tools ribbon and selecting Manage Templates. In the Template Manager, they can click the New Template Folder icon and designate a template folder. Once that is in place, you can place any valid Flare XHTML file in there you want. When users create new topics, they will see that template folder and its templates as options from the New Topic dialog.

Hopefully, this at least provides some place for you to start.

[JimOfRoseville]

Daniel,
I think you're exactly answering what I'm looking for...

If I'm understanding YOU correctly:

1. User could (basically) define the "content" of the XHTML template using my intranet tool (Which, BTW, our users already have. I'll use these templates as a skeleton to build off of)
2. The User could then download the template to a pre-defined directory location from the intranet tool (also saving it in a central location for others to download and collaborate, etc., part of my requirements)

According to the rest as you explained, Bob's your uncle, this will work.

Lemme know if I got this right.
AND
THANK YOU!

[wclass]

To add to Daniel's note - here is the help page explaining more about templates in Flare - it might help:
http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... plates.htm

We keep templates for topics and projects in a central location and all the writers can access them easily. It's easy to add new templates just by copying files into the specified locations. We don't create much content externally, but we have certainly created items like browse sequences and context sensitive alias files with external tools and pushed them to the right locations.