Any way to autoassign CSH Alias IDs or speed up process?

[jcoria]

I am using CSH alias and assigning values. The assign new button just parses the last entered when highlighting a new topic to alias. Is there a way to select several, such as a folders worth and have Flare assign a value and ID?

I recall, some time ago, but I am not sure, that RoboHelp allowed you to do this...

Thank you.

JC

[doc_guy]

I don't know of a way to do this in Flare. It would be nice, because creating CSH IDs is a pain, especially when you add new content to your project.

[RamonS]

Would be nice to assign IDs right in the topic properties, but I advise against just randomly have some automatic process assign IDs or even aliases. I recommend crafting a numbering scheme and maintain a look-up/cross-reference table of topics and IDs. In the past I used simply blocks of 100s as IDs based on the various areas, but when I implemented field level help I used a scheme of xxxyyyzzz numbering with xxx being the main area, yyy being the topics in that area, and zzz being the IDs for the bookmarks having 000 be reserved for the topic itself. So 103005007 would be area 103, topic 5, and 7th bookmark from the top. It's a pain in the rear and very time consuming, but very helpful when the GUI changes and some field wanders from one tab to the other and all the developer knows is a map ID. Of course, you can shorten the scheme to make it a bit easier, but that depends on how large the project is. Also, having such a scheme in place makes it easier to ID independing projects that are used within the same application, for example when you have a more generic help for a report editor that is used in more than one product. I'd look into a numbering scheme if you have a project with several hundred topics that each have potentially a larger number of bookmarks. For a small app that by all means remains static that may be overkill.

[GregStenhouse]

The header file is just a plain old text file, and you can add to that directly which can make your life easier. As an example:
1) In Flare, generate a list of all your topics (e.g. add a report file with "Topics Not Linked By Map ID")
2) Copy the list of topics into a column in Excel (you need to get rid of spaces, i.e. delete the initial "File: " and leave just the topic filename)
3) In column 2, enter a number which is the map ID/value e.g., start at 1001 and add 1 to each cell below etc
4) In column 3, create a formula that looks something like ="#define "&A1&" "&A2, and fill down the column
5) Copy column 3 (the formula results), open the header (*.h) file from Project/Advanced in a text editor, and paste at the bottom of any existing entries.
6) Now in Flare, you can open the alias file, and all the identifiers and values from the header file will appear (but no topic yet). All that is left to do is to select each entry and double click a topic to associate each identifier.

[Ken Billing]

Greg's tip is great (thanks, Greg). In fact, you can extend it for step 6 to associate the topic files as well. Saved me a ton of time mapping hundreds of topics, so I thought I'd pay it forward. I used a formula similar to the following to generate lines that I pasted into the project's .FLALI file.

=" <Map Name=" & CHAR(34) & "UGHELP_HID_" & A1 & CHAR(34) & " Link=" & CHAR(34) & "/Content/EasySync/" & SUBSTITUTE($A1, "_", " ") & ".htm" & CHAR(34) & " />"

In the above formula, "UGHELP_HID_" is a standard ID prefix for my project. Yours may not need one. The CHAR(34) statements insert double quote characters. The path "/Content/EasySync" is the path to my content files. Yours may be different. The SUBSTITUTE statement substitutes spaces for underscores in column A that contains the CSH IDs that I generated. Bottom line, your formula will probably be different than mine, but this gives you something to start with.

Enjoy!
Ken