MadCap Software Forums

Here is something quite basic that's really annoying about Flare...

1. I make some edits to a topic.
2. A few minutes later, I decide the edits are not appropriate.
3. I decide to close the topic without saving.
4. But lo and behold--Flare closes the topic immediately without prompting me to save!
5. Reopening my topic, I discover that Flare has "helpfully" saved my changes even though I didn't intend it to!

This "auto save" feature in Flare has become really annoying...it doesn't work like Word, where "auto save" just saves a temporary copy in case of disaster, leaving it up to you to confirm the final save. Flare's auto-save saves your topic as if you pressed Ctrl-S yourself.

I don't suppose there's any way to change this behaviour short of submitting an enhancement request (or disabling auto save)?

In v8 you can disable auto-save or change how often it does the auto-save. Can't remember if the option was available in v7. In v8, you go to File > Options to get to the screen.

Although I do think you should submit a bug report at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx to report that it closed a modified topic without asking for confirmation that you wanted to close it without saving it.

You can also undo in a topic, of course. I don't think I've particularly noticed if it allowed me to undo past the point where I saved the topic or not (I don't have auto-save enabled).

You've convinced me to abandon auto-save--this goes against my instincts, as I always enable auto-save in my products (we are working in Windows after all). But this backward auto-save behaviour in Flare is completely unacceptable. I've filed a bug report--let's see if they do anything about it.

So what happened to the auto-save feature? I just had a hard crash and lost changes to two files I was in the midst of editing. I guess I'm going to have to get in the habit of saving manually all the time, but it's disappointing that Flare doesn't have an auto-recovery feature like Word.