Flare Tip: Change the Order of the Accordion Tabs

Following is a brief article I wrote for the Madcap Software knowledge base in November 2006. It tells how you can change the order of the accordion tabs in WebHelp or DotNetHelp. You may wonder why you would want to do this. The main reason I would suggest is that you can make the browse sequence tab appear immediately after the TOC. This essentially allows you to have two TOCs since in Flare browse sequences are made up of books and pages just like the TOC.

Summary:

How to change the order of the Accordion tabs on your WebHelp output.

Full Description:

Some customers want to be able to change the order of the accordion tabs. This can be done by editing the skins file in an External editor such as notepad.

Solution:

Warning: The following is not supported by Madcap Technical Support. This is provided for your information only.

1. Open the <skinname>.flskn file in Notepad, Located in \project name\project\skins.

2. Edit the "Tabs" attribute of the CatapultSkin tag to reflect the order you want.

Example:

<CatapultSkin Version="1"

Comment="This is the default skin"

Anchors="Width,Height"

Width="800"

Height="600"

Top="0"

Left="0"

Bottom="0"

Right="0"

Tabs="TOC,BrowseSequences,Index,Search,Favorites" <--- CHANGE THE ORDER HERE DefaultTab="TOC">

IMPORTANT! Any changes made to your Skins after this will cause this file to be overwritten and you will need to edit it again.