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Participating Frequently
May 31, 2024
Question

Condition tags in different chapters

  • May 31, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 1120 views

Hello all.

I working on a large project with RH 2022.4.179 and am wondering how (or even if) I can apply condition tags to "shared" content so the same content, with the proper condition tag can display the appropriate version of the text in a different chapter.

 

For background:

We used to have 5 different applications and a recent overhaul of the product technology rolled all 5 (plus one more) into the same application, with each of the previously independent product now being a module or mode of the new, all-encompassing app. For the first rollout of the product documentation, I published each module (prviously standalone application) separately but now I must roll everything into a single, unified guide.

 

My problem is:

Two of the previously independent apps (now separate modules) share a large amount of underlying code and my former colleague who wrote the documentation at the time used condition tags to share the 85-90% of the content that the apps had in common. He left the company ~19 months ago and I have inherited his content. Everything was fine for standalone products and separately documented modules of the new product; the conditions were simple "Include" and "Exclude" for the product-specific content and each product/module had its own build condition. I am struggling to apply the same kind of conditional logic to a unified user guide where each module has its own chapter.

 

The 2 products, now modules, in question are SP and ST. If I publish for SP, I use the condition expression that uses SP-tagged text and excludes all ST-tagged content; same thing if I am publishing for ST (excluding all SP content). Those conditions are fine when SP and ST documentation are separate entities (either as an application of unified product module), but the all-in-one user guide I am trying to build can't use the same conditional logic as SP and ST are separate chapters of the same project. The extra fun kicker is that the two chapters are one after the other in the ToC.

 

Any advide you can provide on how to apply conditional formatting so it applies only to a chapter would be greatly appreciated and prevent me from ripping all my hair out.

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2 replies

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 1, 2024

The common content is a mix of complete topics and sections within a topic, correct?

 

I think @Jeff_Coatsworth's suggestion of considering snippets does need a serious look.

 

If a complete topic needs to be in the TOC more than once, that is OK but it will throw a search as there will only be one result, the first instance of the topic in the TOC. I think by creating multiple topics that all contain the same snippet, the search will give multiple results but the user should be able to see which is part of their area of interest. Do be careful that what appears to be the same content is just that. It is possible it is 99% with just a word or two difference.

 

Do be careful how Expressions work. Include and Exclude should both work as there names suggest but Exclude has always worked better than Include. See Expressions (grainge.org)

 

What I think I would do here is create a new project and import just a few representative topics from each area and use that for test purposes. It will test theories quicker than in your main project.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

 

 

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H
HotBranchAuthor
Participating Frequently
June 6, 2024

Thank you both, Jeff and Peter, for your insights.

 

While I like the snippets approach, it would likely end up being a lot of work for little actual benefit, as the SP and ST products share >80% of their content, and some topics where the condition tags are used are literally only for the product name and a supporting screenshot. Further, after discussions with various team members and management, we've come to the conclusion that much of our user base will only ever use a maximum of 2 or, in some instances, 3 modules, all of which have their standalone user guides already. The desire for a unified user guide was from a C-suite individual but I and my manager are ready to defend the decision to not use that approach.

 

That said, there is a new product on the horizon where I might need to use some of these ideas because it will likely interface with the current product, so I will brush up on my use of snippets.

 

THank you again for your help with this.

K
KarenMinOR
Inspiring
June 6, 2024

I'm a fan of snippets, but I've also created "shared" condition tags that are included in multiple documents. For example, change some tags to SP_ST and then include those in both outputs.

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 31, 2024

I'm still trying to visualize all this - have you looked at merged help structures? If they were all separate projects before, it might be easier to combine them in some sort of a merged help layout. If not, then I believe you can condition content, topics, and TOC entries to appear/not appear in one huge single source project.

H
HotBranchAuthor
Participating Frequently
May 31, 2024

I'm sorry, I may have misspoke or at the very least explained the current situation incorrectly.

 

Pre-2023, the 5 products were 4 standalone projects, with the SP/ST products "sharing" a project and the build condition tags worked fine. In 2023, the new project started, and I imported the content from the 4 projects into one, with a folder for each product, but the SP and ST products were part of their own project folder with the necessary condition tags applied to specific text. Without getting into the weeds of how the project evolved, each new module had its own "app configuration" section that had applied when they were all standalone products. The new, unified product shares all the configuration options, so I had to remove all the old, redundant configuration sections and created a single, shared configuration options folder (and sub-folders). What I'm hoping to get is a single document with each module as its own chapter or section of the overall guide (i.e.: take all the standalone guides and combine them into a single output).

 

In the project structure, each module has its own folder with the unique text that applies to that module. The problem is that the SP and ST products are still part of the same folder with conditional tags applied where necessary. I've attached some screens of my project, the condition tags available, the available condition expressions, and the SP build conditions in hopes that you'll better understand where I'm starting from. The screens allow me to create perfectly fine individual documents for each module, but I'm stumped on how to create a condition expression that will allow SP content to appear only in the SP chapter and the ST content in the ST chapter of the same document. I could, if I have no other option, duplicate the shared SP/ST folder and make each one unique to the module, but any text adjustment (to the >80% of shared content of ~150 pages per module) will have to be done twice, and I would definitely prefer to avoid that.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

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Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 31, 2024

What about putting the common parts in Snippets and then conditionalizing their use back in the topics?

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