Alias file reports silly errors & how to work Alias files

[Cinnamon]

Hi folks
I have a large number of targets from my single sourced project. Five of them are WebHelp and they each have CSH IDs assigned in a single alias file (which picks up info from five header files).
I have set up lots of conditional tags to ensure that I don't include files from the wrong application. This all works fine, until the CSH side of things is generated.
An error is reported for every file that is omitted from the target. So if I was building Target1, I get a message for each file conditionally omitted from target1. I don't really need to know this, as I set up the omission. There are so many errors that the system stops displaying them.
Then things got worse when I tried to fix this. Instead of having just one alias file, I decided to create one for each application, and assign the approproate one in the target properties. But for some reason Flare lets you have multiple alias files - as long as they are actually the same one with different file names. So as soon as I started clearing out the IDs from the other four applications, I found that I'd deleted them from the project. I had to pull in the header files and set up the CSH IDs again.
The thing is I did exactly the same thing over a year ago. What I'm doing seems to be so intuative, the GUI controls all work as I expect and then I realise I've happily been deleting lots of work.
I think I must be doing something really silly here. Can anyone tell me how to make multiple Alias files work?
Thanks

Suze

[NorthEast]

Ok, you're not being really silly - the alias editor isn't terribly intuitive in this respect.

One key thing to understand is that what you see in the alias editor isn't actually all contained in the alias file itself.
The editor is showing you all of the available identifiers that are defined in your project's header files (all of them), and which ones you've assigned to a topic in that alias file.

The alias file itself doesn't contain all of those identifiers that you see displayed in the editor; it only contains a list of those identifiers that you've assigned to topics.
Incidentally, by default the alias editor will show all identifiers (i.e. from all your header files), but you can use the drop-down list (at the top) to just show identifiers from a single header file.

Anyway, if you delete an identifier in the editor, what you're actually doing is removing it from the header file (and project altogether); so it's no longer available for any alias file in the project.
So, if you delete an identifier that was assigned in a different alias file, then it won't work any more for your other alias files. The other alias file will still include the entry, but as the identifier has been deleted it won't work. Flare will report these errors when you build a project with the message 'topic identifier "x" not declared in any header file'.

In your situation, if you have backups of your header files (before you deleted the identifiers), then putting these back in your project will return your identifers; it will also fix any of the errors mentioned above.

[Cinnamon]

Thanks Dave.
I'll put in an enhancement request.
There doesn't seem much point in being able to select the alias file for the project then! LOL

Thanks again

Suze

[NorthEast]

Thanks Dave.
I'll put in an enhancement request.
There doesn't seem much point in being able to select the alias file for the project then! LOL

Thanks again

Suze

I guess being able to use different alias files is useful if the mappings need to be different between targets; i.e. where the outputs might use the same identifier but you need to link that to a different topic in each target.