Exotic Topic Formats

Summary

How to create topic names with exotic titles

FlexWiki has a lot of bugs and formatting topic titles with exotic characters is often impossible. Below is a list of hacks to get around the bugs with intended and unintended consequences.

Index of exotic titles ¹

Colons and Parentheses
Underscores
Hyphens

¹ Does anyone know how to make those links to the topics below?

Topics with a colon and parentheses

Creating a topic title with a colon may be impossible.

Answer

I believe it will always be impossible (unless filenames/topicnames are URL encoded/decoded before/after rendering/creating). Since Topic Names become .wiki files and they exist under the file system, you can't use characters in the following set: \ / : * ? " < > |

Wonder

What if the SQLProvider is used as the backend so the topic files are placed in SQL?

The SQLProvider would solve the issue but presents more problems. I think FlexWiki is striving for maintaining FileSystem as the primary content storage solution. But, if the URL is not encoded, then those characters will present a problem. WikiPedia uses colons in the file name: wiki/Fake_20:100.

Wonder

MediaWiki runs on Windows too; this must mean they've solved this problem. Why can't you encode the topic name so that it fits any file system restrictions?

Problem with SmashingWordsTogether

For example, to create Mt 5:30 as the title name, it will not create a link by smashing the link together like this: Mt5:30 or TopicName(12)

Problem with brackets

[Mt5:30] or [TopicName(12)]

Hack

To work around this, the following was suggested

 @@Presentations.Link([federation.LinkMaker.LinkToTopic("Mt 5:30")].ToOneString, "Mt 5:30")@@

HackError

Using linktotopic has a bug where the federation name is left out of the url, thereby rendering the link useless.

HackErrorError

Prefix the Topic with the federeration name, i.e., "FlexWiki.Mt 5:30" - but it won't fix the problem.

Problem with typing topic title in the topic bar

If you try to type Mt5:30 or Mt 5:30 in the topic bar, it will give you an application error.

Solution

None found yet

What is possible

You can create topics with parentheses in special cases. The problem seems to be ending with a closing parenthisis.

Paragraph(12)a (Paragraph)12 Paragraph)12(

Linking to a topic with a beginning Underscore

Some system topics begin with an underscore: _NormalBorders, _InterWikis

Creating topic links to these can be troublesome.

If the topic, for example _NormalBorders, exists in a simple paragraph like this one then no problem.

But if you introduce an InterWiki topic before (example _NormalBorders) and after then the topic fails to render correctly (the underscore is missing and the URL has <em> instead).

And if you introduce WikiTalk before (example _NormalBorders) and after then the topic fails to render correctly (the underscore is missing and the URL has <em> instead).

Bug entered:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1237940&group_id=113273&atid=665396

--JoeGasper

Bug fixed as of build 1712 - NathanJones

Problem with too many WikiWords

Question

How do I mark something that FlexWiki thinks is a WikiWord as not being. For instance, I typed SQL2000 in a documentation Wiki on our intranet and I can't work out how to tell FlexWiki that that isn't a WikiWord. PBWiki uses a lead ~ to block a WikiWord being generated.