The Mysterious Case of the Missing Condition Colors (V6)

[royj]

Madcap broke my condition tag set.

I installed V6 and started working on my main project, when I noticed that topics that I knew had a condition tag applied were not showing the color in the Content Explorer. Some of the tagged topics show the right colors, but some of the condition colors do not show up. When I viewed the topic properties, the condition was indeed applied, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the Content Explorer.

Same thing happened with TOC entries in the TOC Editor. Entries that I knew have a condition applied did not display the color marker.

And it was only a few conditions; some showed up fine, but others didn't show at all.

It took some digging around, but I sussed what's going on: Flare 6 does not like it if you have a period in your condition tag name. That wasn't an issue in v5.

It doesn't seem to choke on any other special character, but if you try to put in a period, you'll get the message "The Condition Tag "New.Tag" contains an invalid character (.)" (Interestingly enough, I did NOT receive this error message when I was experimenting with my existing tags that had a period in the name. Bad Flare! Bad!)

The solution for my project: Rename the offending tags, search/replace those tags in my topics, AND open the TOC in a text editor to clean up the tagged entries. Yeesh.

[doc_guy]

It would have been interesting to know if Flare 6 built the project correctly even with the periods in the condition names.

Glad you solved your issue. What a pain to have to go through to rename the conditions in your project! Thanks for the heads up. I'm sure other people will run into the same issue.

[royj]

Just realized that I need to clean up my targets as well.

And what about image files that are tagged? Ye gods, what a pain.

[helen]

Eugh - I'm feeling your pain!

That was a sneaky change, what's wrong with having periods in your conditions?

[jacortes]

ouch...er, hello MadCap??

That's the only reason I need not to upgrade. I'd have to reapply the condition tags in both English and Japanese files? God bless anyone with more than two languages! This really has to be fixed. I'm submitting a bug.

[helen]

ouch...er, hello MadCap??

That's the only reason I need not to upgrade. I'd have to reapply the condition tags in both English and Japanese files? God bless anyone with more than two languages! This really has to be fixed. I'm submitting a bug.

You and me both - bug in. I hope they'll release a patch, I've gone back to V5.0, I do not have the time or inclination to proceed with all that renaming!

[NorthEast]

At a rough guess, I'd guess it's to stop conflicts if there was also full-stop (period) in the file name.

In the HTML, the conditions are in the format MadCap:conditions="file-name.condition-name".
Since you can have a full-stop in the filename, e.g. "my.file.condition", then allowing full-stops in the condition name may have been causing conflicts.

However, not good if you're already using them!