Generating IDs for navref elements

[julio]

Hi,

I am currently working on a script to generate documentation for new products. We use an automated process to create all files of a project, that is, a whole new solution in Visual Studio, so I would like to add a way to also generate a product's documentation during that process.
My question regards merging H&M projects, which are common to all products, to this new project. The Help & Manual XML Language Reference states that a navref node contains an id attribute and this id must be unique. By checking on other H&M projects we have, I noticed that this id is a very large number, probably a random-generated number. Is there a range of numbers that an id must fit in? Is it OK to generate a random number, even though smaller, to fill in? The Language Reference also states that if this id is not provided, H&M creates a new id when opening the project, but I would like to avoid that.

Thank you.

[Tim Green]

Hi Julio,

The navref number is taken from the creation time of the TOC or topic entry in milliseconds. I've never tried to decode it up to now but it doesn't look as though it is the standard Unix/Windows milliseconds time, as the numbers are much too high for that. I'll check...

[Alexander Halser]

Hi Julio,

Just ignore the attribute. The NavRef IDs are random numbers - a kind of GUID - generated whenever a node does not have one. Once assigned, the node keeps this ID for its entire lifetime. That's all there is to it.

When creating a documentation programmatically outside Help+Manual, you can simply omit this attribute. It is not required unless H&M needs to synchronize two projects (language pairs) or in multi-user editing mode to synchronize multiple changes to the TOC. When the project is opened in H&M, it automatically assigns IDs to all TOC nodes that don't yet have one. When saved, the ID is permanent.

There is just one case you might want to consider: if you programmatically create a project and the project is used in multi-user edit mode. In that case, you might assign a random integer number to every node ID (e.g. time stamp + running number). The only rule is: the number must be unique within the project.

[julio]

Thank you all for explaining how it works. Usually we do not edit projects in multi-user mode, but I will consider that.

Thanks.

Hi Julio,

Just ignore the attribute. The NavRef IDs are random numbers - a kind of GUID - generated whenever a node does not have one. Once assigned, the node keeps this ID for its entire lifetime. That's all there is to it.

When creating a documentation programmatically outside Help+Manual, you can simply omit this attribute. It is not required unless H&M needs to synchronize two projects (language pairs) or in multi-user editing mode to synchronize multiple changes to the TOC. When the project is opened in H&M, it automatically assigns IDs to all TOC nodes that don't yet have one. When saved, the ID is permanent.

There is just one case you might want to consider: if you programmatically create a project and the project is used in multi-user edit mode. In that case, you might assign a random integer number to every node ID (e.g. time stamp + running number). The only rule is: the number must be unique within the project.