Options available under the Authoring tab in Site’s Advanced settings are there to help you configure the Authoring tool to assign elements to steps more accurately. When you choose Assign element in the Authoring tool while creating a step, the Authoring tool will create the best selector to identify that specific element, whether it's a table, a button or a field. The default behavior works well in most cases, however, you can alter it in 3 ways if needed, depending on your application’s behavior


With the Authoring settings you can:
- tell the Authoring tool to ignore specific selectors,
- tell the Authoring tool to prefer specific selectors,
- tell the authoring tool to put a higher priority on selectors. For example, by default, the Tag selector (h1, table) are weighted as more important than other selectors such as classes or attributes.


In this article, we’ll explain all above options.


Accessing the Authoring tab

  1. Login to Inline Manual portal with your e-mail and password.


  2. Go to Sites and choose the desired site.

  3. Go to the Settings tab and choose the Advanced settings on the left side.



The first section you’ll see is the Authoring one.



Selector blacklist




Your application might add dynamic classes on the fly, which you may want to ignore. For example, many applications apply an .active class to menu items in navigation. If the Authoring tool uses the .active class, a walkthrough might not perform correctly if the user hasn’t navigated to that specific menu item, and the step won't display properly. In this case, you can add .active to the blacklist and that selector will be ignored to avoid such situations. Remember to enter one selector per line.


Attribute selector whitelist



If you enable attributes (set weight above 0.1), we recommend using the Attributes whitelist so not all attributes will be picked up. One of them could be href to include links or src for image source. If the Attribute selector whitelist is empty, it will take into an account all the attributes.


Selector weights



You can change the weights of the selectors that are being used when assigning an element. Each application is different and might need a different setup. For example, if the application is generating new IDs each time a page reloads, you may want to disable the ID selector. In that case, set its weight to 0.0 so the Authoring tool will ignore the ID selector. Get in touch with our support@inlinemanual.com if you need help tweaking selectors.


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