Path issues in deploying to subdirectory on server

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cclark
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 12:30 pm

Path issues in deploying to subdirectory on server

Post by cclark »

Our technical writers have produced a ton of content in Flare and it's been handed to me to host and make available in a WordPress page.
I'm a web developer, so I know Java, HTML and JavaScript, but not so much about Flare.

Anyway, we have an Apache webserver that hosts sites from several different projects. I only have access rights to the directory set aside for my project.
Currently, the directories are like:
\MyProject\MySite\<bunch of WordPress directories>

My tech writing team published their content to a shared network drive (they don't have any access rights to the server, although those could be arranged).
So I copied their output to \MyProject\MySite\...\wp-content\madcap and then later to just \MyProject\MySite\MadCap

On my WordPress site, I have an <iframe> and I load it up with src="\MyProject\MySite\MadCap\default.htm".
(Followed the scant directions at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/blog/2013 ... rom-flare/)
This sort of works... I can see most of the skin, but there is no content and no functionality! :(
The reason is rather obvious: the default.htm contains a number of <script> and <stylesheet> tags that reference "Resources...". When I load up the default.htm, it calls back to my server and the server is looking for \Resources off of root, but it's actually located at \MyProject\MySite\MadCap\Resources.

I spent several hours yesterday pouring through the Flare docs trying to see if there is a way to have the scripts generated with \MyProject\Mysite\MadCap\ pre-pended to the resource paths, but I couldn't find anything.
So I'm hoping somebody here knows how I can get this to work. Dumping the Flare content into the root directory of the Apache server isn't a desirable option. Nor is setting up another server specifically for the Flare content, although if that's the only way to do it, I'll have to escalate it and let people know.

Is there a way to control/dictate the full path in generated content?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
cclark
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: Path issues in deploying to subdirectory on server

Post by cclark »

Turns out that I figured this out while waiting for my post to get posted.
The path issue is actually that the scripts have "Resources", but the published directory is named "resources".
This works on Windows, but when we copy it up to our Linux server, the "R" doesn't equal "r" and so the scripts can't be found.

I fixed it by simply renaming the directory to "Resources" with a capital "R" on the linux server. After that, things appear to be fine (although I have to get our tech writers to check it and make sure the skin is displaying correctly).

This is likely related to:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27031

Just the way that my issue manifested, I didn't connect the dots immediately.
cclark
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 12:30 pm

Re: Path issues in deploying to subdirectory on server

Post by cclark »

In case anyone else stumbles across this and is helped by it, there was one more "gotcha".
After the Tech Writers looked at the output, it turned out that the styling was slightly off. The fonts were wrong and a few other issues were present.

It turned out that there was one reference with a hard-coded lowercase "r" for "resources".
So I had to create a "resources" directory on our *nix server and move \stylesheets\styles_1.css to \resources from \Resources

After doing this, everything displayed correctly. I was even able to pass in a cshid and get the context-sensitive help working!
Our *nix deployment now has both "\Resources\" and "\resources\". Bit of a pain, but it works, which is the main thing.
Dave1975
Propeller Head
Posts: 53
Joined: Thu Sep 15, 2016 4:25 am
Location: Belgium

Re: Path issues in deploying to subdirectory on server

Post by Dave1975 »

Hi cclark,

I know this post is already quite old, but I was wondering if you could share whether your setup is still up and running and if you needed to make adjustments as you went along?

Reason for asking is that I would also like to try and push Flare content to an existing website. For the moment the website is Drupal based but most likely our team will move to Wordpress in near future.

I will ask our developers to look into use of Iframes but an issue that I read about a lot is that Flare topics are loaded with CSS and proprietary information (skins etc...) that might not work very well with an existing website. In that context even clean XHTML seems not to be an option.

Did you encounter that problem as well or is that all bypassed when you use Iframes?

Next to the website we have quite a lot of other targets, both online and PDF but that is all completely managed from within Flare.

thanks

regards

David
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