RoboHelp 2020 - Topic and Text Conditional Tag Issues

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 9, 2021
6 replies
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I recently migrated from RoboHelp Classic 2019 to 2020. I'm having an issue with topics that have conditional tags at the topic level and at the content level. For example, Topic 1 is tagged for Audience 1 and Audience 2, but not Audience 3. Topic 1 also has tagged text that is specific to Audience 1 and different tagged text that is specific to Audience 2.

The expected behavior is that the builds for Audience 1 and 2 should have Topic 1 with the corresponding audience text. Topic1 should not show in the build for Audience 3. What happens is that Topic 1 is in the builds for Audience 1 and 2, but the text for both audiences show in the topic.

If I remove the topic level conditional tag, then the proper audience text appears in the builds for Audience 1 and 2, but then Topic 1 is included in Audience 3 build and you can search for it and find it.

Any ideas what the issue is? The builds worked fine 2019.

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

The whole thing is a bit more complex than it might appear because of the way expressions were first set up long before Adobe owned RoboHelp. Adobe cannot fix the issue as to do so would break all existing expressions. They are between a rock and a hard place.

Take a look at Build Expressions (grainge.org) and in particular download the demo project to understand better.

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K

KeithVECogneroAuthor

Known Participant

I have 11 audiences/clients. So my current build statement for Client 1 is:

Include when audience is Client 1

Are you saying the build statement should be:

Exclude when audience is Client 2
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 3
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 4
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 5
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 6
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 7
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 8
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 9
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 10
OR
Exclude when audience is Client 11

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Exclude statements have always worked best with RoboHelp. You have said it all worked in 2019 and to the best of my knowledge nothing changed in 2020 so it should still work.

Topic 1 is tagged for Audience 1 and Audience 2, but not Audience 3. Topic 1 also has tagged text that is specific to Audience 1 and different tagged text that is specific to Audience 2.

I suspect what is going on here is the Audience 3 build is looking at Topic 1 and including it for 1 and 2 because of your tag and including it for 3 because it is untagged for 3. The build expression is saying include 2 and 3 but for this purpose Topic 1 will be untagged in the sense that 3 is not applied.

Try adding tag 3 to the topic but leaving the build expression alone.

Personally I would go with the fact that over twenty years of using RoboHelp, include has been behind many problems, changing to exclude has fixed things.

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A

Amebr

Community Expert

How do you have your condition expression set up? Just using 'exclude' or do you have 'include' selected sometimes?