Can I "populate" a Friday FAQ from my database?

If you have a database of questions & answers, you may want to use it to "populate" a Friday FAQ. With a little bit of programming or some manual text copy and paste, it's fairly simple.

Friday stores everything in a series of plain ASCII text files. We're happy to share the file layout and other necessary info with you, but we can't offer free technical support for problems you may run into when generating these files with your own programs.

That said, here's the layout:

In the \FAQ subfolder of your FAQ folder, you'll find:

FRIDAY.TXT - contains a series of two-line pairs of information. The first line of each pair is the text of a question in the FAQ (ie, what you see in the list on Friday's screen). The second line of the pair is either the name of the TXT file where the answer is stored OR a line beginning with @. The @ marks it as either a heading or a special command (CMD).

The name of the TXT file doesn't (and mustn't) include a path or .TXT extension. Friday assumes and supplies this automatically.

In the same folder, you'll find (or should create if you're building your own FAQ by program/by hand) a series of FAQnnnnn.TXT files where nnnnn is a number. Friday creates these sequentially as you add new questions to the FAQ. Each file contains the text for one of your answers. If you need to learn which answer file relates to which question, hold down the Shift key and click Add Q to get a listing.

In the main FAQ folder you'll find FRIDAY.FQA

FRIDAY.FQA is a standard Windows INI-style file that stores the settings you've chosen in the Settings dialog box. There's only one entry you'll want to modify in FRIDAY.FQA if you're creating your own FAQs programmatically or by hand:

[IO]
HighFAQNum=33

When Friday creates and numbers its own answer TXT files, it uses HighFAQNum to track the highest number it's created to date. When you add a new FAQ, it increments this number. You'll need to set this to at least one higher than the highest numbered file you've added other than via Friday. Otherwise, later manual entries could accidentally overwrite the ones you've added programmatically.

Best bet: Set HighFAQNum to a fairly high number after you've added your own FAQs in some other way. Friday doesn't mind gaps in the numbering sequence.

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Friday The Automatic FAQ Maker