My developer has given me a list of identifiers that I am adding to my Alias file in order to link to CSH in my project.
The main identifier will link to Items.htm where there will be info about the Items workspace in our app. Its identifier is 3dda2b11-9171-45ab-a50b-a5dc3219664a, which I copied and pasted successfully into the Alias file.
Second one to be linked is to a file that contains all the fields on one of the tabs on the Items workspace in our app, where I've listed the Help contents for each field on that tab, with a bookmark of its field name. For instance, Effective date is a bookmark in the file, the Help text I want to pop up in CSH is "The date on which the alias became effective. If adding a new alias to replace an old one, inactivate the first before adding the second." The identifier from the developer is 1a386ecf-fdf7-4ca2-a925-6a3b8c5c33d8. As you can probably tell, these identifies are generated randomly. I copied and pasted this identifier into the Alias file and got an error that said identifiers cannot start with the "1" character. Why not?
I fixed that and got another error message that said Identifier cannot contain the character "-". Why not?
Note that the first identifier has dashes and I was able to save that... I copied and pasted them from the same source, so they should be the same actual character...
Next I was experimenting and tried to save the identifier that starts with 3dda... again but with a b on the end of it to make it different from the first one, and got an error message that said identifiers cannot start with the "3" character. Why not?
Can someone tell me all the rules for naming identifiers so that I can tell my poor beleagured developer and hope his random number generator can work within the acceptable formats? I would like to know why my copy and paste dashes worked in one case but not the other, too.
TIA,
Mellissa
Invalid characters in Alias files and can't start with 1
-
LissaEntero
- Propeller Head
- Posts: 16
- Joined: Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:02 am
- Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada
- Contact:
Invalid characters in Alias files and can't start with 1
Flare 4.2.0 on Win XP
Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.
Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.
Re: Invalid characters in Alias files and can't start with 1
It sounds like a restriction in Flare's alias editor - probably something to do with the fact that CSH identifiers can't be numbers, as they could conflict with the CSH values.
If you enter these values in the alias editor then you'll get the messages that you saw. However, if you enter these identifers in the header file, then they'll appear in the alias editor without any problems. You can map topics to them and the CSH links will work as expected. You still won't be able to edit the identifer in the alias file editor though (just its topic mapping).
Saying all that, to make your life easier I'd just get the developer to change the identifer format; e.g. prefix the generated value with some alphabetic characters and strip out the dashes, e.g. HELP3dda2b11917145aba50ba5dc3219664a.
If you enter these values in the alias editor then you'll get the messages that you saw. However, if you enter these identifers in the header file, then they'll appear in the alias editor without any problems. You can map topics to them and the CSH links will work as expected. You still won't be able to edit the identifer in the alias file editor though (just its topic mapping).
Saying all that, to make your life easier I'd just get the developer to change the identifer format; e.g. prefix the generated value with some alphabetic characters and strip out the dashes, e.g. HELP3dda2b11917145aba50ba5dc3219664a.