Index warning mystery

[dorcutt]

So, this isn't life or death by any means, but it's rather annoying.

I have a project that I build several targets out of. One target which has a small subset of the overall topics is throwing two errors:

Linked index term "X" is not in the index, skipping the link "Alias of X 1"
Linked index term X is not in the index, skilling the link "Alias of X 2"

Interestingly, there's no error like this one:

Linked index term "X" is not in the index, skipping the link "X".

Now, there is no index proxy in this target. I checked the target's Advanced tab and the "generate index proxy" option is not checked. Using the Index link viewer, none of the (very few) index entries that I created as a test are in the topics that are part of this topic.

What's going on? Am I missing something, or is this a bug of some kind?

[LTinker68]

Since it says "Alias of X", I'm wondering if it's talking instead about the alias file, which would be used for calling to a help topic from within your application. Are you using an alias file? Could you have an entry in that alias file pointing to a topic that you've conditioned out of that output, so it can't match the alias entry to a topic in the output?

[dorcutt]

Sorry, I was trying to generalize. By "alias" I meant "See" links. To be clearer, I have an index term named X, and I have two more terms that have "see links" as the Flare Help calls them, or index cross-reference links, that refer the user to index entry X when they look up term Y or term Z

So, my index says:

X
<definition of X>

Y
See "X"

Z
See "X"

And the error messages would be:
Linked index term "X" is not in the index, skipping the link "Y"
Linked index term "X" is not in the index, skipping the link "Z"

None of those terms appear in the docs linked in this target according to the Index window, and the target does not have an index.

Sorry about the lack of clarity with terminology. I must have been hanging around my developers too long!

[LTinker68]

None of those terms appear in the docs linked in this target according to the Index window, and the target does not have an index.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "target does not have an index". Do you mean you don't have a topic containing the indexProxy included in that target's output? If so, whether or not there's a topic with the indexProxy has nothing to do with whether or not the index terms are processed. If you added index terms, then Flare will run through the process of generating them. Assuming your target is PDF output, then if you don't have a topic with the indexProxy in it, then you simply won't see the results of those index terms being processed because you didn't provide any mechanism for them being displayed.

I don't know if I've ever noticed if an online output will skip processing the index terms if you didn't turn on the option to display the index in the skin. If I had index terms then I included the index option in the skin, so I'm not sure what happens for online outputs.

With that said, I'd guess that the topic containing the term for X has been excluded from that output, and that's why the term isn't being processed, because it's not supposed to be included in the output, so it removed all references to it (direct references and indirect "see..." references).