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A
Asi2013
Inspiring
December 7, 2011
Question

Breadcrumbs Behavior in RH8 and RH9

  • December 7, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 1208 views

Greetings!

I hope that this has not been posted before anywhere in these forums, if it has, my apologies.

We are currently using RoboHelp 8, but the behavior seems to be identical in 9.

I was curious if anyone else has noticed this, whether it has caused any issues for your users and have you come up with any workarounds.

Here are the details:

Lets say that we have a Project in RooboHelp which consists of multiple folders, each with multiple topics.

Project: Test Project 1

Quick Reference Index - Yes (exists)

Policy (Folder):

  • Policy Topic 1
  • Policy Topic 2
  • Policy Topic 3

Procedures (Folder):

  • Procedures Topic 1
  • Procedures Topic 2
  • Procedures Topic 3

Just for this example, lets say that we have a user that is looking at "Policy Topic 3". They are done reading it and now want to go to "Policy Topic 2", using the breadcrumbs.

The breadcrumbs would look like this Home -> Policy -> Policy Topic 3

By instinct, the user clicks on "Policy", hoping that they will see a list of all the topics within Policy and they can quickly navigate to "Policy Topic 2". Unfortunately, each time they press on "Policy", the tool takes them automatically to the 1st topic under Policy, i.e. "Policy Topic 1".

In general, there seems to be a very logical explanation for this behavior, since the tool is designed in such a way that when a user clicks on any of the folders ("Policy" in this case), there's nothing to be displayed.

As you can imagine, this jumping from topic to topic can lead to some confusion and frustration for the end users, to the point where we have disabled it for most of our documents, thus focusing the users to use to search, use the table of contents or the Index.

Has anyone else noticed this and have you been to find a way to make the breadcrumbs' behaviour more accurate?

Thank you in advance

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
December 7, 2011

Hi there

It's worth noting that there are two types of breadcrumbs that exist.

  • Hierarchial
  • Historical

In this case RoboHelp uses the former, not the latter.

Yours is the first report that I recall seeing where folks are complaining of this specific issue. It doesn't mean others don't have it or haven't noticed it, just that yours is the first I've seen here in the forums.

Basically all I can do is tell you that it is what it is. And if what it is isn't working for you, you are probably better off not using the feature. You might also consider submitting a Wish Form to ask Adobe to consider changing the behavior or providing more options that allow us to choose the behavior we want. You do this using the Wish Form and the link to it is in my sig lines.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links

RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form

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A
Asi2013Author
Inspiring
December 7, 2011

Thank you for the speedy and professional reply Rick. The Wish Form sounds like a great start.

Have a great day

A
Community Expert
AmebrCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 8, 2011

I haven't used the breadcrumbs function, but is it based on TOC folders rather than actual folders? If it is, I wonder what happens if you create a new topic with a list of links for all the topic in that TOC folder, then assign that topic to the TOC folder (right-click properties from memory)?

I'm unsure what that would do to the breadcrumbs, but shouldn't be hard to quickly test.

Amber

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