How to find referrers to an Anchor ID

Please post all questions and comments regarding Help & Manual 7 here.

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
Lex Lennings
Posts: 32
Joined: Wed Jun 20, 2007 2:45 pm
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Contact:

How to find referrers to an Anchor ID

Unread post by Lex Lennings »

Currently I am updating the Help file of our application for the next version release.
The old version contains many Anchor IDs, allowing to jump to paragraphs halfway a topic. For the new version a number of these paragraphs have become obsolete, so I'd like to delete them, including the Anchor ID. However, before deleting an ID I want to check if any referrers to that ID are present.
So my question is: how can I find referrers for an Anchor ID ?

The only information I could find was very old (2007), in the H&M 4 forum, telling that this was not possible and that it could be done by exporting all topics to one large XML file and then searching that file. In H&M 7 I could not find a option to export to one large XML file. The option Save_as to one single file storage exports a ZIP file containing an load of separate XML files.

Has any new functionality been added on this issue since 2007 ?
I am hoping for a simple command in H&M, like for the normal Topic IDs :-)

Thanks in advance, Lex.
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: How to find referrers to an Anchor ID

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Lex,

Thank you for your mail!

You can't do this from within Help+Manual but the references are still quite easy to find. You just need to save your project in the uncompressed HMXP format and perform a multi-file search for anchor="anchor_id" in the XML files in the /Topics folder, replacing anchor_id with the ID you are searching for. If you don't have a tool for this you can use the excellent free Notepad++, which is also one of the best general-purpose editors around and has lots of useful plugins.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Lex Lennings
Posts: 32
Joined: Wed Jun 20, 2007 2:45 pm
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Contact:

Re: How to find referrers to an Anchor ID

Unread post by Lex Lennings »

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your very quick support.
This is indeed a nice workaround that I can use.

Please add this suggestion to your wish-list for future versions,
as I think it will be useful for others as well :-)

Lex.
Post Reply