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Chris_Dant__
Participant
May 8, 2019 12:10 AM UTC
Question

Publish Date in a Variable - RoboHelp 2019

I'd like to display the publish date (taken from the system, not typed) of a piece unobtrusively on a page in a RoboHelp 2019 piece as a way to better support reviewers. I didn't see a way to get any sort of date in a variable in Help though. Any ideas? Is it not possible (yet)?

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6 replies

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
May 8, 2019 12:57 AM UTC

I'm going to crawl way out on this shaky little limb and say it's basically impossible at this point. The silly variable editor appears in a pop up window and as near as I'm able to discern, it has focus and you can only type or paste into it. So I tried adding a field to a topic as Amebr has shown. And sure, it added to the topic just fine. I figured at that point it would just be a matter of copying the field and pasting into that variable dialog. Nope.

It DID seem to paste, but as near as I can tell it only pasted the value and not the actual field.

Cheers... Rick

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Community Expert
AmebrCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 8, 2019 2:54 AM UTC

But you could add it in a master page footer, then it would be on every page.

And if the "Auto-update this field" checkbox actually works, it should theoretically update every time you generate. Or at least every time you update and save the page?

Disclaimer: Thought experiment only. No guarantee this will work.

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    Community Expert
    AmebrCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 8, 2019 3:00 AM UTC

    And it is managed somehow, because when I try to type in it, I get a "It is read only content" warning message at the bottom of the window.

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    Community Expert
    AmebrCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 8, 2019 12:46 AM UTC

    Assuming RH 2019 New, you can insert fields which include a date. I haven't played with how these work though.

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    Chris_Dant__Author
    Participant
    May 8, 2019 2:16 PM UTC

    For my example, this would work to put the publish date and time on a page in the output. All I need is for it to be someplace unobtrusive but visible so that reviewers and users can always reference it.

    It would also be good to have a set of tokens or symbols like %PubDate% or %PubTime% that could be used in variable definition value fields and then displayed as variables anywhere in the piece.

    Thanks Amebr​ and Captiv8r

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