I’m working with a junior help developer who is learning the ropes in Flare and she found something yesterday that I hadn’t contemplated in a long time:

The scary error messages that appear when building a target

I blow by these messages nowadays – because I know what they are and why they’re there. But someone new to Flare may not understand them. Here’s the first box that comes up – and to someone new to Flare, it’s scary enough:

But the terror doesn’t stop there, when you click OK you are faced with a list of items that Flare calls Warnings in the window above – but Errors in the build progress. Here’s a tiny list:

And here’s a much larger list:

These two lists have two things in common:

• To the new Flare user – these lists mean something’s broken and help won’t work!
• Neither, when it comes down to it, is anything to truly worry about.

How do I know?

Well, simply put, if the View Output button is enabled, as it is above, the help compiled and you can view it. Now that doesn’t mean that everything’s perfect, but at least you don’t have something so horrible that the build is abandoned.

In the short list above, I’m being told that there’s a missing linked source file. I know that I’m not using that image in this help project, so I disregard the warning. If I wanted, I could go track down the image, confirm that it’s not being used, and delete it. OR, I can just ignore the warning and move on.

The second list has a a number of types of warnings:

• Missing linked files
• Missing snippets
• Links pointing outside of the project
• Topic identifier not declared

Now, I can absolutely see how someone would flip out over this list. But it’s not as scary as it looks.

• The Topic Identifier warning is in regards to Context-Sensitive tags and it’s telling you that those IDs are not in the alias of the target you’re building. No big deal. That’s one set of warnings down.
• Missing linked files – I know I’m not using that file in this project – so that’s two down.
• Outside links – after reviewing this list – these links are not associated with this project (and I’m not sure why they’re appearing here actually) – that’s three
• The final one – the missing snippets – those are actual warnings that should be heeded.

Now, from the whole list, we have only 3 warnings but since two are identical, we really only have to figure out why those two snippets are not working.

In summary, don’t let the size of the list scare you. Look through it and start discarding irrelevant messages. Then you only have to bother with a few that may apply.

I’m laughing here and I really shouldn’t….because it’s over the futile efforts of a colleague who is learning Flare. But her pain and suffering may help you…so read on.

For several hours, she has been getting a compiler error. She suspected that the issue was in the skin because that’s where she had been working but didn’t know exactly what she had done to cause the problem. If you’ve ever worked on a Flare Webhelp skin – you KNOW that there are a bazillion settings. She had no clue what she had done to get the error.

I advised her to check the MadCap Forums for guidance….check the Help system in Flare.

There was no joy in Mudville. So, after about 3 hours of trying in vain to fix the problem, I get an IM from her, “NOTHING IS WORKING.” Now, she’s not usually a yeller so I figured that this was the time to step in and try to solve the problem. I had a hunch…

I asked her what she had set her icon tray height to. She’s in a different room from me – but I swear as sure as I’m sitting here, that I COULD SEE her tilt her head like the RCA dog.

She responded that she had set it to 2px….and I recommended that she change it to 5px. Below is the IM convo…

So, if you get a Parameter Not Valid – Compiler Internal Error message – check your icon tray height. Seriously – I bet you $5 it fixes the problem.  Have you had this error appear?