Google analytics (or similar) in a CHM?

This forum is for all Flare issues related to the Microsoft HTML Help target.
This target produces "CHM" files in the output.
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Paul_N
Propeller Head
Posts: 54
Joined: Mon Feb 09, 2015 5:57 am
Location: Yorkshire, UK

Google analytics (or similar) in a CHM?

Post by Paul_N »

Hi all. I was wondering if anyone had managed to get Google analytics (or similar) working from CHM help? I have a couple of old products to maintain that still have a big user base. It would be very useful to find out which bits of the help are accessed the most.

This old thread from 2013 asks the same question (unanswered), so I suspect the answer is that you can't use analytics with CHMs, but no harm in asking!
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17338&p=91607&hilit ... chm#p91607

I'm using Flare 2019 on Windows.
SKamprowski
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 277
Joined: Fri Feb 13, 2015 8:25 am
Location: Germany

Re: Google analytics (or similar) in a CHM?

Post by SKamprowski »

Hi,

your customers might have problems if you publish a chm on a network drive, unless they have really old Internet Explorer versions installed!
Kind regards,
Sabine Kamprowski
DocToHelp MVP (by ComponentOne)
Paul_N
Propeller Head
Posts: 54
Joined: Mon Feb 09, 2015 5:57 am
Location: Yorkshire, UK

Re: Google analytics (or similar) in a CHM?

Post by Paul_N »

SKamprowski wrote:Hi,

your customers might have problems if you publish a chm on a network drive, unless they have really old Internet Explorer versions installed!

True - I have low expectations of success for Google Analytics in a CHM...
NorthEast
Master Propellus Maximus
Posts: 6359
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:33 am

Re: Google analytics (or similar) in a CHM?

Post by NorthEast »

Google Analytics is designed to collect analytics for pages on a web server, but a CHM is deployed in your local file system rather than a web server.

A quick Google search suggests it's possible to get GA working on a local file system, but involves modifying some of the GA code to get it working.

However, even if that works on a local web page, I've no idea if that would also work for a CHM, because a CHM is effectively running in IE7 compatibility mode and is quite restrictive.
SKamprowski wrote:your customers might have problems if you publish a chm on a network drive, unless they have really old Internet Explorer versions installed!
That isn't really related to GA, but CHMs don't run from a network drive at all, as Windows security will block them.
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