Stack empty error on open file

[Graham Campbell]

I've only very recently been suffering an issue with Flare when opening topics to edit in the XML editor. I see this:

stackerror.png

which is frankly useless information.

This doesn't happen with every topic, and the topics that are affected all seem to be properly formatted HTML (Flare does still report formatting issues when I make elementary mistakes).

Most often after I click OK, I get a blank tab opened with the title of "Untitled"

stackerrortab.png

but sometimes the tab isn't blank and contains the content correctly, but is still titled "Untitled".

I'm using Flare 5 with the recently released updates installed. Note that I've only seen this error after installing the updates.

Anyone else seen this and know how to get round it?

Cheers,
Graham

[Graham Campbell]

To tie this one off, I found through talking to those excellent MadCap support bods (specifically Kip and Ryan, to give the proper hat tip) that the issue arose from my PageLayout having multiple Body frames, as opposed to just a single Header, Body and Footer each.

Now, my position on this is that I should be able to have as many Body frames as I want and MadCap at least admit that that should be the case:

[from MadCap support]

Yes, you can technically have as many Body frames as you like in a given page of your Page Layout, although it does introduce additional complexity to the layout which, in this case, was interacting with the other factors I mentioned to produce a nasty side effect. Hopefully our developers will be able to get to the bottom of the issue using your project as a test case.

The other factors referred to in that correspondence are my insistence that divs (which, among other things, we use for Note and Warning boxes) break across pages (that is,

Code: Select all

page-break-inside

is set to

Code: Select all

auto

in the CSS).

This is the house style and not really up for discussion to change, though I feel that how I configure my CSS should be entirely independent of how I configure my PageLayouts, or anything else for that matter. Not that that stopped my stack error from continually appearing of course!

The upshot of all that is, pending a MadCap fix, the simplest workaround was to remove the second body frame from the PageLayout. Not ideal, but it did allow the topics to open for edit properly.

Hopefully this will be of help if anyone comes across a similar suitably bizarre confluence of circumstance in future.

[bleebs]

Thanks for that information. Just deleted the second body frame in the offending layout and all was well.

Shame I couldn't keep the body frame though - I spent ages getting it to look beautiful!