Link to a topic in an external flare-project

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mvdweer
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Aug 16, 2011 1:03 am

Link to a topic in an external flare-project

Post by mvdweer »

Right now we are working with .chm files, but soon we want to move our software to a DotNet-platform, and therefore we also want to publish our helpfiles in DotNet. The software will change completely, so we will also build the Helpfiles from scratch. So moving CHM to DotNet is not the issue here. I mentioned it so you know our reference-point. We work with MadCap Flare 7.

We build several software-packages and want to build a help file for each of these packages.
Though, there is a 'General'-helpfile and a 'Reports'-helpfile which are equal for all software-packages.
In the software-specific helpfiles we have topics that contain links to pages in the 'General' or 'Reports' helpfile.
With .chm files these links are easy to create in Flare. But I can't find an acceptable way to do this in a DotNet helpfile.

I tried to create a topic with the option 'Enter External Help System'. As a result I see all the topics of the 'General' helpile in the TOC of the software-specific helpfile. That's great. But, I couldn't create a link in a 'software-specific'-topic to a 'General'-topic.
I tried several ways to do this:
- Creating the Output-files of the General-helpfile, and link directly to the right Output-.htm-file
- Publishing the General-helpfile and link directly to a published .htm file
- Creating the Output-files of the Software-specific helpfile, while it already contains the link to the 'General'-helpfile, and then create a link to the right .htm file of the General help, in the Subsystems folder.
And probably I've tried more options but I can't remember them exactly anymore.

The only way I got this to work in a published form is this:
1. I inserted a hyperlink in the text of a topic
2. I selected the option: 'External file' and typed the RELATIVE path to the PUBLISHED .htm file that contains the topic that I want to link to.
With this method, it's easy to make a mistake and the 'Link Viewer' in Flare can't find the files to which the links are pointing, therefore it reports them as broken links.

I believe there must be a way to make this work with madCap Flare, and I hope anyone can help me with this.

Greetings,
Mascha
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