Text variable in the footer

[Paul Elbertse]

Good morning,

I am using PP3 skin flat slate blue.
I activated the footer after adding a text variable.
When you load the index, the variable is shown correctly.
When you move to another page, the footer shows the variable itself, but not the contents (e.g. <%YEAR%> instead of 2016).
After refreshing, it is loaded correctly, but after switching to another page again it is not loaded correctly.

I also noticed that when I publish to a share (not a webserver) the footer is only loaded the first time.
Opening another page, there is no footer anymore.

PS I Always publish to a share first before uploading to our server.

I hope this can be fixed.

Regards,
Paul

[Tim Green]

Hi Paul,

This is a fundamental problem with the new WebHelp 3 format that we are still discussing in search of a better solution. At the moment, you cannot use any variables in the footer block. This may sound strange, so I will explain what the background is:

Since the pages are now frameless, browsing between topics is done by replacing the topic content on the page with the content of the topic you want to display. This is stored in highly compressed JSON format in a JavaScript file, and its contents are identical to what is inserted by the <%TOPIC_TEXT%> variable in your topic page template. This variable only contains the contents of the topic from your project. It cannot contain something like the footer.

At the moment, the footer is stored in an external HTML file, and that remains static on the page. When you load a new topic the footer is updated by reading the external HTML file, but if that contains variables you will only see the variable names, because variables cannot be processed in external HTML files. The reason you see the value of the variable in the footer the first time you open the page, before you browse to another topic, is because that version was in the original page template that is NOT replaced dynamically -- and there the variable WAS replaced correctly on publishing.

We hope to have a good solution for this in place in the upcoming 3.1 update. At the moment, I am afraid you need to avoid using variables in the footer...

[Paul Elbertse]

Tim,

Thanks for this quick reply and explanation.

It's no problem at all, I will remove the variable.
I will just keep it very simple.
The thing is that I like having a footer because it looks nice and it is a good indication of the end of the topic.

Regards,
Paul

[Paul Elbertse]

Tim,

One more thing:
Is it correct that the footer is not always displayed when the page is loaded from a share (no webserver)?

Regards,
Paul

[Tim Green]

Hi Paul,

Is it correct that the footer is not always displayed when the page is loaded from a share (no webserver)?

That is not a known issue but I think I can imagine what the problem is. I will check into this and if it needs a fix it will be included in 3.1. Thanks for reporting this.