Problem with writing a proper condition expression in RH20

Thanks for this. Nicely laid out. I'm going to try to wrap my head around it, but it will take a bit of time. When I get a chance I'll try different combinations of

OR - Include

OR - Exclude

AND - Include

AND - Exclude

to see if that adds a new complication.

Hi @Amebr Hmmm, #4 might actually explain some of the issues, if only I understood what it actually means. 😞

The condition expression seems to be very sensitive to the order. If you re-write your expression to

(Online AND NOT B AND NOT C) OR (A AND NOT Print)

does it make any difference?

If so, my explanation above is incomplete or maybe wrong. It's like the later clause breaks some of the logic from the earlier clause. I just don't know what the rules are.

I'm very late to this thread, but I just spent some time working through the logic of conditional expressions. I think you can set up expressions for Print/Online and Client_A/Client_B/Client_C, etc., without needing special Client_A_Only conditions.

A. Logic of condition expressions, as I understand it. I know this isn't exactly how others have explained it, but I did quite a bit of testing of different scenarios. This seems to check out, and it does map reasonably well to standard Boolean logic.
1. All the ANDs are evaluated before the ORs. So
"A and B or C and D" is evaluated as "(A and B) or (C and D)". This means that each OR clause is a separate test.

2. A conditional element is included in the output if at least one of the OR clauses is true. All of the AND clauses within an OR clause must be true for the OR to be true.

3. "Include" is true if the condition is set on an element. "Exclude" is true if the condition is not set (essentially equivalent to NOT).

4. In my testing, it looks like an "Include" flag can only be set within one OR clause for a given value. If it's set in multiple clauses, then only the last clause is used. There might be something else going on here, but that's my best guess.

B. Example:
For my project, I have Platform as Print/Online, and Product as Prod1/Prod2/Prod3/Prod4. To generate Print output for Prod1, I want everything that is Print (without any other conditions), plus everything that is for Prod1, unless it is also tagged Online. This captures Print, Prod1, Prod1/Print, Prod1/Prod2, etc. That is,
(Platform = "Print" AND no Product conditions set) OR (Product = "Prod1" AND Platform NOT= "Online")

The .expn source looks like this. The UI will follow the same structure, but I find the .expn easier to read. As far as I can tell, the flags on the <group> element are not used for condition expressions. Maybe they are used for dynamic content filters.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<expr>
	<group flag="Exclude" op="AND">
		<tag name="Platform" value="Print" flag="Include" op="AND"/>
		<tag name="Product" value="Prod1" flag="Exclude" op="AND"/>
		<tag name="Product" value="Prod2" flag="Exclude" op="AND"/>
		<tag name="Product" value="Prod3" flag="Exclude" op="AND"/>
		<tag name="Product" value="Prod4" flag="Exclude" op="OR"/>
		<tag name="Product" value="Prod1" flag="Include" op="AND"/>
		<tag name="Platform" value="Online" flag="Exclude" op="OR"/>
	</group>
</expr>

I finally got it !

@Peter Grainge Your reminder finally triggered illumination 🙂 : 

"The key thing to remember is

• With AND expressions any content that has any one of the tags will get excluded.
• With OR expressions all the tags in the expression have to on the content."

Below is the condition expression that I ended with (after creating the additional tags Client_A_Only, Client_B_Only, as you suggested, and retagging my text with those tags), which works when I generate my online help for Client A and that I can easily transpose to Client B and it also works !!!

And here is the result, which is exactly what I want.

Thank you very much again @Peter Grainge and @Amebr !!!

I'll send you my project tomorrow and you will see they are getting included. It's also shown in my images.

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