Topic IDs

[Tim Frost]

While making a minor edit in our main help project, I saw a pop-up which included the words: "In TFS projects, topic IDs must not start with $". First, what is a TFS project? Second, For many years, we have had many dozens of topics with this type of ID, with no issues. Is this a new restriction and if so, in which H&M version did it start? I am not sure if we have actually created a new manual (we build HTML/PDF/ebook) since upgrading to v10 so we might need to drop back if we find this to be a breaking change when I next build. Our IDs contain none of the other characters shown in the pop-up.

[Tim Green]

Hi Tim,

TFS is/was Microsoft Team Foundation Server, the rather Byzantine version control system that used to be their standard, and which Help+Manual used to support. Fortunately, Microsoft has in the meantime seen the error of their ways and they have phased out/are phasing out TFS, and support for it was dropped with the switch to scripted support and the addition of git, which is now also the Microsoft standard.

For your current situation: Existing projects with topic IDs starting with a $ will work fine, with the caveat that you will get a warning message when publishing that you will have to click away. But you won't have any other problems, provided you're not managing the project in TFS. That being said, topic IDs with non-alphanumeric characters are generally bad practice, so it really doesn't hurt that HM now prevents this.