Search / Replace variables and conditional text tags

[Alex]

It would be great if search & replace variables/conditional text were possible I have got hundreds of entries already.

[Tim Green]

Me too!! Please!

[Byron S.]

Me too. Tomorrow, please.

[Kooswillem]

Yes, and in the TOC too, please.

Marketing:
Lets change that name to this. Oh, could you change that in the documentation...?

Then you realise that you have to change everything in the TOC manually...

[Martin Wynne]

Marketing: Let's change that name to this. Oh, could you change that in the documentation...?

Hi,

Have you thought of saying no?

Martin.

[Kooswillem]

I did, unfortunatly they where actually had a point this time and the new name did sound better and covered the concept better then the last.

[Riveting]

I could do without the 'replace' conditional tags, if I could just get the 'search' functionality. Doing a manual replace/edit is easy enough, but I have to visually scan all my topics for occurrences of the tags, which is a major pain and has room for error (and hurts my eyes).

How is everyone else getting around this problem? I assume it's by searching the XML source, but that method only does one topic at a time, and I have hundreds of topics.

I'm the person responsible for adding to the wish list a request to allow text variable names to be searched, which was implemented a few versions ago, and that I use daily. I just love this product and the people who work on it for listening to their customers.

Someone please post a better work-around for searching for conditional tags.

Thanks in advance,
-Rich

[Tim Green]

Rich,

Search and Replace Tags is high on the Wish List. You can actually do a global search and replace already by exporting your project to XML first. To do this compile to XML with File > Compile > XML, selecting the option to export all topics to a single file. Then open the main XML file in a text editor and do the search and replace operations. After that you can import back to your project with File > Import > XML, selecting the option to replace existing topics. You can preview the XML code you need to replace in Help & Manual by selecting the XML Source Code tab in any topic. (Boilerplate text that you have already seen in another thread, I know... )

[Riveting]

Thanks for the response. What you said about using the XML would be true if I wanted to 'replace' the tags, but I just want to 'find' them without doing a replace, because I need to modify the text before, between and after the conditional tags. And the changes are different in each place so I can't do it globally in the XML file and re-import it.

And, if I try to use the full XML output file to search, it becomes near impossible to determine which topic the tag was found in.

I'm glad the conditional tag search is high on the wish list as you stated. please get this feature in there ASAP.