Snippets & User Defined Variables

After ~5 years of not working with any HAT, I began a new position on 3/28/2016 and am giving the RH 2015 trial a spin. I'm really excited by what I see and have been able to do thus far.

I have 3 “entities” to write about and I have created 3 pages, one page per entity.

On each of these overview pages, I have this first sentence:

|

This section describes how to enter and manage [entity].

|

I’ve defined each [entity] as a user defined variable. I hard coded each page with this sentence and added a reference to the User Defined Variable and then generated the output. Works awesome.

Now, I’m going ‘down’ a level. What I want to figure out is how to make

|

“This section describes how to enter and manage”

|

be a snippet. I want it to be a snippet because when I write a better sentence, I don’t have to make the same change on each of these overview pages. Eventually, there will be 19 overview pages.

Does anyone else structure their content like this?

What I want to avoid is making multiple manual changes. For example, if the following examples were in a RoboHelp project, on https://support.assessment.pearson.com/x/N4Dy, there is this sentence:

This section tells you how to manage user accounts.

On this page - Manage Paper Tests - PearsonAccess Next Online User Guide - Pearson Assessment Support - there is this sentence:

This section covers all of the unique aspects of paper testing.

What I am trying to do is have a snippet that is defined as:

This section tells you how to

and refer to it on both pages.

On the first page, it would say

<snippet>This section tells you how to</endSnippet>

<beginUserDefinedVariable>manage user accounts</endUserDefinedVariable>.

Then on the second page, it would say this:

<snippet>This section tells you how to</endSnippet>

<beginUserDefinedVariable> manage paper testing</endUserDefinedVariable>.

|

The reason I want it as a snippet is because I don't want to have to maintain "This section tells you how to" as hard-coded text on each of these overview pages. I want to leverage the content reuse functionality to avoid a bunch of copy / paste or even find / replace.

Thanks for any help!

Paul Hanson

RoboHelp MVP from a looonnngggg time ago....