MadCap Software Forums

I'm looking for a way to generate a cross-reference map, i.e. a list of all pages, that do a cross-reference (or <a> ) to another page.
Flare provides the link viewer that gives me a list of files referenced by a topic, and where it is referred to, but I want to generate a report that collated all of these together.
I'm also only interested in .htm and not snippets or images.
Is there a way to do it ?

If not, assuming I have good programming skills, what is a good tool to scan the madcap files, pull out information and generate the cross-reference I'm looking at ?

A bit of background on where I'm coming from since maybe I can completely change my way of working and avoid this issue in the first place.

As I write a topic, I think of other topics I want to reference. In order not to lose that thought, I
a) create a dummy topic in a "TBD" folder in the topic tree, add a one-line sentence outlining what needs to be in the topic
b) mark the file as "not for output"
c) put a cross-reference to the dummy topic in my article at the point I want to refer to it, and add a class of "tbd", my CSS ensures that this class is defined as "display : none" so that it doesn't show up even if I generate output.

Now months later I have 30 such files, so in any case, I need a way to unravel my links - but maybe I need to rethink my workflow - what do you think?

Could you search for the "not for output" condition? If you've only used that condition for topics you haven't written yet but have created, it should find them. Obviously that won't work if you've used "not for output" for other topics though.

No I use it for other things - I could do a text search for the reference and the tbd class I suppose, but I need a way to collect the output and pretty print it - you gave me some food for thought - thanks

This sounds like a great workflow, yonatanlehman! I've been contemplating something similar (though not as elegant), and hope you'll keep updating this thread with your findings as you test out ways to accomplish your task.

Thanks for sharing!

What if you create a new condition 'tbd' that is excluded from the output, and you assign that condition to your 'tbd' class (assuming you have the version of Flare that supports conditions on styles)? Then you could run the condition report and see what files are listed under tbd.

Bit of a thought experiment as I don't have Flare at the moment.

Not sure if Analyzer (or the Analysis tab in 2018) will have something you can use? Or a report?

Did you ever find a way to create a table of xrefs? I know Flare stores this information, it would be nice to pull it out into one file.