Conditional File in Book?

[Jason L-S]

I think the answer to this question is a simple "no." However, I thought I'd ask anyway to see what advice you might give me.

I have a book with 10 chapters. Each chapter is a separate file. Some of the chapters themselves need to be conditional. That is to say, the entire chapter should be conditionalized depending upon which version of the book I need to build.

There is no way to do this in FrameMaker 8, at least as far as I know. What I'd like to do is select the .fm file in the book window and make it conditional.

Making all the text in the file conditional is a second-best option. However, with the chapter number conditional, and then hidden, when I update the book the other chapter numbers are not correct. For example, if I make chapter 5 conditional, and then hide chapter 5, the TOC shows chapter 4 and then chapter 6.

So what's the best solution? Do I include an unconditional chapter title page with some text such as "Chapter 5. Content unavailable for this version of the manual."

Thanks,

Jason 

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

FM 9 has an "Exclude" function at the book level, but the easiest thing for you might just be creating new books with the appropriate .fm files you need for each "build" or "version"

[Guest]

Dear Jason,

Your conclusion is correct, so far as I know: there is no way to make the appearance of an entire chapter (a .fm file in a .book file) conditional. I think that an acceptable solution is to have separate .book files for different purposes.

In that way, you still achieve the goal of information-reuse (the separate .fm files in each .book file are the same), but you express the information organized in different ways.

I myself would not include an unconditional chapter title specifying that the information in the chapter is inapplicable to the book at hand. I think that readers would find that confusing.