New topics linked into TOC not found by Flare build setup

[NigelBennett]

Since upgrading to 2017 r2, when I add new topics to my projects' TOCs they now appear in the TOCs as blue links rather than the "old style" normal text. My laptop installation has no problems with these links and builds HTML Help files without errors. However after I push the projects through our SourceTree system, our Flare build setup in TeamCity appears not to see these TOC links. It therefore reports a list of "Missing linked source files", and as these files are listed as missing it also creates a list of “Missing cross-referenced files” for any topics that link to those files. It then fails the build with an exit code 7.

In three different projects, all the new "linked" topics are listed as missing in our Flare Build setup's build logs, and any topics that refer to one of these new topics are also listed as missing referenced files.

Does anyone know a way of adjusting the Flare build setup so it sees the links in the TOC, or failing that, how can I add topics to the TOC using the "old" method?

[devjoe]

I would first check to ensure that your build system is also updated to Flare 2017r2. The blue links use a new system variable which did not exist in Flare 12 or earlier versions. This variable represents the topic title and is used as the TOC text, so that updating the topic title (or first heading, if title is defaulting to that, which is also default configuration) updates the text of the TOC entry. The earlier versions do not have this variable and will fail, though that is not quite the failure I would expect, but maybe it is a side-effect of failing to build the TOC entries correctly.

[sharper]

You don't have to keep the variable links in your TOC, just go to the properties for that topic and enter the text you want in place of the variable in the Label field. I found that I would get a Flare compiler problem if I had an old style TOC and add a topic to it using the new variable TOC topic title and Flare would cancel my build. But this was only happening with one of my projects. I did some digging and when I enabled the "Exclude Index Entries from Search" option in my target (on the Performance tab), the Flare build completed successfully.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I can't stand that "feature"! So whenever I add a new topic I change its name back to the old way. (It wasn't broke, so why did they fix it?)

Peace and love

CM