Exporting Topic IDs and Anchors

[James McCaig]

Afternoon all. We've been using Help & Manual for a few years now to document our software product. We had added code to our application to direct users to specific areas of the manual and this has been working well, but we've reached a point where the consistency of the naming anchors and topics has resulted in us deciding to give the manual a bit of an overhaul.

As a result, we have spent some time restructuring the manual and renaming the anchors to provide a more consistent (and professional) approach to it all.

Which leads me to my issue/question. Our development team have requested a list of all the new topic IDs and the associated anchors so they can recode our application to direct the user to the appropriate sections of the manual. Is there a way to generate this from Help & Manual?

I had a search while waiting to join the forum but could not see anything obvious, nor could i see any options in the Help & Manual software itself.

Is it possible? Has anyone had to do something similar before?

Thanks in advance. Hope someone can help.

J

[Tim Green]

Hi James,

You can use the Context Tool in the Project tab to generate a list of topic IDs and anchors. It can also be used to import a map list of IDs that will create new topics for IDs that don't exist. See here for details:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_a ... ntext.html

Does that do what you need?

[James McCaig]

Afternoon Tim. Thanks for the prompt response.

I'm afraid its not quite giving us the results we are after, but this could simply be due to our understanding.

We were looking for a list of all anchors alongside their associated topic. For example, we have a section of the manual called "invoicing". This topic contains multiple anchors for various subsections within it. Looking at the Context Tool and the EXPORT option, we can see what we want, but the export doesn't give it.

Previously, the anchors/topics were all added to our software as we added parts to the manual, and the developers used the format of <%TOPICID%>#<%ANCHORID%> to reference the parts of the manual to open. So we are looking for something in a similar format:

<%TOPICID%>#<%ANCHORID%>

So, for the anchors used within the "INVOICES" topic, we thought the export would provide us with something like the following:

<INVOICES>#<INVOICENEW>
<INVOICES>#<ACCOUNTS>
<INVOICES>#<FCSNAPSHOT>
<INVOICES>#<INVOICEDETAILS>
<INVOICES>#<INVOICEDOCUMENTS>
...

However, we seem to be just getting a list of Topic IDs and the help context number (sample below). Nothing i do seems to give me the form i would like/developers want.

#define Invoices 161

Am i missing a trick here?

J

[Tim Green]

Hi James,

Unfortunately, you only get anchors if they have context numbers associated with them. You can use the "Custom" option to configure how the output is generated but the <%ANCHORID%> variable will still only be generated for anchors that have contrxt numbers. I'll post a feature request to add this with the development team, as it does make sense, but I'm afraid it's not something that could be made available quickly.

[Alexander Halser]

Hi James,

The Report Tool ("Full Project Report") does include the anchors with every topic, no matter if they have a context number or not.

[James McCaig]

Thanks both. I'll check out the report and see if that helps provide the necessary info.