Flare 4: Find and Replace Get Stuck in Loop

[Pohutukawa]

It has been frustrating trying to get Find and Replace to work in Flare 4.

On the Find and Replace panel, I set the following:

"Find in" to (whole project).
"File types" to Topics
Cleared all the check boxes.
Entered a known, good search word in the "Find what" field.

I then clicked Start.

Flare finds the first page in the project with the term. When I click Find Next, it finds additional matches on the same page, but it never goes beyond that initial page in the project no matter how many times I click Find Next. The highlighting just loops among the matching terms on that one page. This is worse than a similar issue in Flare 3.1, which tended to work unless I had hidden popup text.

Do you have any ideas how to get this to work, please?

I discovered that if I manually open each and every file I can search for that term page by page. That is unacceptable if you have many dozens if not hundreds of topics.

[helen]

I don't have Flare open here but if I recall correctly you have to click the '>>' button (or similar) rather than "Find Next" to move past the current page. Sorry if that's a bit vague, it's getting late on a Sunday afternoon.

[bbuchko]

That's strange, it works for me when I set the Find In drop-down to (whole project), click Start, then click Find Next. It doesn't look like you're doing anything wrong. This might be a dumb question, but are you sure the term appears elsewhere in the project? If so, it might be time to open a support ticket.

EDIT: Ok, I just read your post more closely and it does look like it appears in multiple topics. Unless one of the more qualified posters has a suggestion, it sounds like ticket time to me.

[NorthEast]

As helen said, if you click the >> button (next to Start) then it'll move to the next topic.

Clicking Find next does normally work, but sometimes if you click outside of the search pane (e.g. edit something in the topic) then it seems to forget it's doing a search of the whole project.

[Pohutukawa]

The >> button is greyed out.

To the left of the >> button is a weird-looking blank field. It's below the field where one selects File Types. (The File Types field (list) is accessible.)

If I could place a screenshot in this message, I would.

How do I enable the greyed out >> button. I've clicked around the area, saved and shut down Flare, restarted it, but to no avail.

Please advise. Thank you

[LTinker68]

It becomes available if you select an option other than to search the current document and after you've clicked the Start button. If you're searching just in the current document then it doesn't become available (you just use the Find Next button).

[Pohutukawa]

Thank you. I see my error specifically of this morning.

That is, this morning--after two cups of coffee at that--I did not select (whole project).

For future consideration, please consider the user-task flow and usability of this panel. This panel is a bit of a jumble of labeled and non-labeled UI objects. The flow is up and down and up and down... Inexplicably, "(whole project)" need not be parenthetical...

Regardless of my ranting, thank you.

[helen]

Thank you. I see my error specifically of this morning.

That is, this morning--after two cups of coffee at that--I did not select (whole project).

For future consideration, please consider the user-task flow and usability of this panel. This panel is a bit of a jumble of labeled and non-labeled UI objects. The flow is up and down and up and down... Inexplicably, "(whole project)" need not be parenthetical...

Regardless of my ranting, thank you.

Glad you got it working.

I do agree, the only reason I jumped in with the '>>' button was it confused me too when I came to do my first global find and replace and I remembered how confounded I was when I figured it out. I wasn't too sure what was going on - it was trial and improvement! Perhaps submit a feature request? https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[KevinDAmery]

For future consideration, please consider the user-task flow and usability of this panel.

Just so you're aware, this is a peer-to-peer support forum - most of the people who respond do not work for Madcap (Madcap employee avatars are orange - everyone else is a Flare user much like yourself). While Madcap does monitor these forums, they don't always have time to look at every post. So, if you want them to change something in the UI, it's best to make a feature request using the URL Helen provided above.