MadCap Software Forums

Hi,

I'm creating a Flare template for department of people who are not and will probably never be Flare ninjas. They want to include a Table of Revisions in the PDF documents that they will output from Flare. Is there any way to generate such a table and auto-magically populate it with data from a topic's Properties dialog? (I'm thinking Topic title, Modification date, Author, File tags, Description info)

TIA
Wendy

I'm not sure if this is on the right track of what you're looking for, but I have a template in Excel I use for a similar purpose. If you have file tags set up and you go to the File List in Flare, you can choose to show/hide columns (including file tags) for each topic. You can select all files or specific files (e.g., only PDF files) and export the File List to a csv file and then paste that data to Excel. My team set up an Excel template with column headings that match what is set up in the File List columns so they match when we export and copy to Excel. We use this for annual reviews with a list of topics to review that shows when a topic was Last Reviewed, who the owner is, etc. Then the SME can indicate their reviewed date and any revisions/comments for each topic.

Thank you! This is definitely a step in the right direction. I'm playing with this to see if there is a way to simplify the process for the group that will be working with this project.

One question: Where does the data for the "User" column come from?

Thanks again!

The description of the User field I found in Flare's online help. I had to look it up because nothing ever populates in that column for me. From my understanding it has to do with source control and the name of the user, but I don't have source control implemented so that must be why it doesn't populate for me. Therefore, I chose to hide this column in the File List.

"Displays the user name. If you see the name of another user in this column, it means that the file is checked out by that user through source control. If necessary, you can request that the other user check in the file so that you can work on it."

https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare11 ... ist%20user

You might be able to combine this with the Import excel feature from 2017r3. You can import to a topic or into a snippet, and you can choose to import as displayed, or include hidden rows/columns,

So it sounds like maybe you could filter the spreadsheet based on file tag or something. Import into a snippet (making sure to import just the visible rows/columns). Create a What's New topic that contains your excel snippet.

Then if you keep the link to the spreadsheet, next time you release it will import your filtered spreadsheet into your what's new topic automagically.

Or at least that's my theory. I haven't actually tried it.

Thanks!

I am on the same page about using the import Excel feature.

It's pretty unlikely at this point that this project will use source control. I may try to capture the author data with a file tag.

Thanks to both of you for your input!