Streamline your MadCap Flare search results

Tech­ni­cal writ­ers with large help projects may want to con­sid­er imple­ment­ing Mad­Cap Flare’s search fil­ter func­tion­al­i­ty to help users stream­line their search results.

By default, Flare cre­ates HTML5 files with­out search fil­ters. By tag­ging your con­tent with meta­da­ta and com­plet­ing some relat­ed steps, you can cre­ate help with fil­ters that you define. For exam­ple, when users search for a term, they can select the type of con­tent they want. The fol­low­ing screen cap­ture shows a user who typed Login in the search field and is look­ing for trou­bleshoot­ing content. 

Flare’s search engine will then only dis­play con­tent relat­ed to the Login search term that is also tagged as trou­bleshoot­ing material.

How to set up search filters

As Flare has already writ­ten doc­u­men­ta­tion on this fea­ture, I have includ­ed the main steps and linked to Flare’s help top­ics. The fol­low­ing steps assume you already have some famil­iar­i­ty with Flare. 

Note: If you click each of the links in the fol­low­ing steps, you will dis­cov­er that there are about 35 steps to per­form in mul­ti­ple and seem­ing­ly dis­parate areas of Flare’s inter­face. If you make a mis­take in any of steps, your out­putted help may not include search fil­ters. I think this is one of the fea­tures in Flare that could def­i­nite­ly be simplified—if I attempt­ed to recre­ate each of the steps and include screen cap­tures, I could eas­i­ly write the equiv­a­lent of 10 pages of content.

Here are the main steps:

1. Add a fil­ter set to your project in the Project Orga­niz­er under the Advanced fold­er. For more infor­ma­tion, see https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2020r3/Content/Flare/Search/Search-Filter-Sets/Adding-Search-Filter-Sets-Projects.htm
2. Add meta­da­ta or con­cepts to your top­ics in Flare. This step involves tag­ging all your top­ics into cat­e­gories. For exam­ple, if my Flare project con­tains trou­bleshoot­ing top­ics, I will need to tag each trou­bleshoot­ing top­ic with a “trou­bleshoot­ing” con­cept. The good news is that I found this step to be pret­ty quick. There are dif­fer­ent ways to tag your con­tent; I end­ed up using the “drag-and-drop method.” See https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2020r3/Content/Flare/Concepts/Inserting-Concepts1.htm
3. Cre­ate a search fil­ter, which lets users nar­rows their search based on the con­cepts you’ve added to top­ics. For more infor­ma­tion, see https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2020r3/Content/Flare/Search/Search-Filter-Sets/Creating-Search-Filters.htm
4. Add a search bar to an HTML5 skin. This step is just a quick check to make sure the search bar is con­fig­ured to dis­play in the head­er. See https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2020r3/Content/Flare/Search/Required-Activities/Including-Search-Bars.htm#HowtoEnabletheSearchBarinanHTML5Skin
5. Asso­ciate a skin with a tar­get. This is also a quick step to make sure your edit­ed skin appears in the tar­get. See https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2020r3/Content/Flare/Skins/Process/Associating-Skins-Targets1.htm
6. Asso­ciate a search fil­ter set with a tar­get. See https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare2020r3/Content/Flare/Search/Search-Filter-Sets/Associating-Search-Filter-Set-Target.htm

Although there is some plan­ning and effort to imple­ment search fil­ters, most of these steps will only need to be per­formed once.