[fjordaan]

I know that hotspots in stencils linking to web pages work, since the Yahoo YUI stencils all include them.

Since I work with many stencils, it would be very useful for my main stencil to include hotspots to other stencils, so I don't have to rely on the pull-down menu to select stencils. I've inserted these hotspots as links to files (and figured out they need to be locked to become "hot" in a stencil), but when clicked, they do nothing. I just hear the Mac's default alert sound.

Is what I'm trying to do possible?

[Joel]

I'd be willing to bet that it can't find the file to open, on my end everything seems to be working fine, so I guess you could double-check the action to ensure that it's pointing correctly at the file you want opened.

[fjordaan]

Well, I'm baffled.

I would've thought that using the Choose File button would insert the correct file link. I select the button I want to hotlink, click Choose File, and browse to the stencil. It inserts the following path:

../Yahoo! Design Stencils/Form Elements.gstencil

which is a relative path from the the stencil I'm editing. But even then, if I click the Open button, I just get the Alert sound.

If I go to the file in Terminal, I can see the following absolute path:

/Users/francoismacbook/Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Stencils/Yahoo! Design Stencils/Form Elements.gstencil

If I paste that into the Browse panel, and then click Open, it opens that stencil. If I go back to the stencil I was editing, however, the path I pasted into the panel is now blank. If I just paste in the path, and then deselect the element, it also blanks the panel contents, so I assume OG thinks the path is invalid. I've tried escaping space characters as %20, but that doesn't help either.

So what do I do?

[Joel]

I'm somewhat baffled as well, when I link to a stencil in the same directory, I get the full path and not a relative one. This is using the latest 5.0.1 release, can you tell me what version you're running on your end?

[fjordaan]

I'm using 4.2.3. Please don't tell me to upgrade to v5, since I don't want to install Leopard (even if I had the time, which I don't). Any chance future updates to v5 will ever be compatible with Tiger?

I'd appreciate it if you could check whether this is a bug affecting v4, because if not I'd really like to get it to the bottom of it. (I've removed the exclamation mark from the directory name too, but that didn't make a difference.)

[Joel]

Odd, using version 4.2.3 I still get the full path to the file's location, and not a relative one.

[fjordaan]

Any suggestions?

[Joel]

Maybe instead of choosing the file to open in the Action Inspector, you drag the intended target file from the Finder to the shape?

[fjordaan]

Here's what happens when I drag the file into the Inspector:

While the file is over the panel, and before I release the mouse button, I see the absolute path:

/Users/francoismacbook/Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Stencils/Yahoo Design Stencils/Form Elements.gstencil

As soon as I release the mouse button, this changes to the relative path:

../Yahoo Design Stencils/Form Elements.gstencil

Which doesn't work, as before.

When I drag a file onto a shape, it also creates a relative path.

[fjordaan]

It has started working, but I cannot explain why. The only thing I'm doing differently is restarting OG after every change.

But get this: the links I created earlier also work, even though I've changed the folder name (to remove the exclamation mark). So I have links to ../Yahoo! Design Stencils/ as well as to ../Yahoo Design Stencils/ -- and both resolve! And as far as I can tell, those relative paths are incorrect, if they're indeed relative to the main stencil. (I'm linking to stencils inside a folder which is on the same level as the main stencil.)

So things appear to be working now, but I'm uncomfortable with all the weirdness going on. For example, why do you get absolute paths and I get relative paths?