Popup Link to External Topic Not Working

[Jodie Boedigheimer]

Hello All!

I'm using Flare 3.1.0

I have two projects that are going to .chm output.

Project A contains a graphic. I create an image map to link some of the fields in the graphic to topics in Project B. The external links are not a problem - I get them and I can see the appropriate text when I build the output, etc. The issue is that these links need to appear as a popup, not in the entire help window. I've specified popup in the image map property for the specific fields, yet the external topics will not appear in a popup window.

What am I missing?

Thanks
Jodie

[Sharpras]

Jodie, sorry I can't help you. I would like to know how you got your links to chm B (an external chm, I presume) to work at all. I have Flare 4.0.

Roger

[Andrew]

Jodie, I'm not able to reproduce what you describe -- if I use merged projects, image popups work fine. If I link to an external CHM (without the merged project), the popups don't work at all.

Jodie, sorry I can't help you. I would like to know how you got your links to chm B (an external chm, I presume) to work at all. I have Flare 4.0.

I can't get this to work at all. I would open a support case with MadCap, were I you.

[Sharpras]

I've found way to get links from chm to chm to work. I have not tried to open a page fromt the external chm in a popup window. The missing bit of information from the Flare Help is ms-its: . So the link (which can be edited with the internal editor) looks like this:

Code: Select all

<A HREF="ms-its:filename.chm::/topic.htm">LinkText</a>

Roger

[MC Hammer]

Hi Jodie
Just an update on this as we had a similar issue.
This does not work for us either (displaying an external topic in a popup window, that is. If you specify to display the link in the same window, it works fine).
We submitted this as a bug to MadCap support and had the confirmation that this does not work in Flare 3.1 and HTML Help (Not sure it works either in v4, or for another output type as I was not the one who submitted the bug and also I have not had time to investigate any further).
You may want to investigate other ways to implement this (Javascript?).
Hope this helps.

[lauraj]

I just spent a good chunk of time investigating this same bug on Flare 5.

It's a really cool bug. The links actually work if you have previously hit a non-popup link to the same external .chm file (from the same .chm file). The picture I get is that there's a reference to the external .chm that gets stored away the first time you hit a link to that external file, but if the reference is null, the code that invokes the popup is incapable of creating it.

It wasn't worthwhile to me to find an elegant workaround for this, so all my pretty (former) popups now open in the main help window.

[KevinDAmery]

Hm. Wonder if there's a way to embed the reference to the external file into the popup link?

[lauraj]

Hm. Wonder if there's a way to embed the reference to the external file into the popup link?

The "normal" link for this purpose includes the name of the external file .... "filename.chm::topic.htm". That doesn't seem to be enough in the case of the popup ... it's like it doesn't know how to find the file given a name/path.