Conditional Build Tags and Dynamic Content Filters

[bilbob59719500]

Hi,

I'm currently on a trial of Robohelp 2017. I'm keen on the Dynamic Content Filters, as this seems like it could be very useful because we have a large set of documents covering a large number of different products/modules and we support three versions for each module, delivered via a merged project. Ideally, I'd like to use CBT to enable end users to filter out the modules they don't care about and also select the version of the software they are currently running.

I'd have two filter sets, Version and Module. By default, they would see all modules and only the content applicable to the current release. I'v spent days (and Willam has been kind enough to give me some advice over email), but I can't get this to work. What I've done is applied a module specific tag to the entire TOC in the module specific projects. If an entire topic is specific to a version, I apply a version CBT tag against that as well and everything works as I would expect.  Once I build the merged project, I can select a module filter to show only content for the selected module and if I select a version number filter as well, then the topics with a version CBT applied appear and disappear as I would expect. However, in-topic content does not work as expected (once merged, it works as expected if I build the project outside the merged project). If I select a module filter, all the in-topic content that has a version CBT against it disappears. I presume that is because by selecting the module filter, the in-topic content with a version CBT against it is excluded, but I can't figure out a way around this, although it must be possible, right? Is in-topic content with a CBT against it treated differently?

Any help, much appreciated! 

[Peter Grainge]

Take a look at the Employee Care sample project. There is a topic explaining DCF with some detail and it is set up to use DCF.

Click Open on the RoboHelp Starter page and then click Samples in the ribbon on the left.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[johndaigle]

In addition to Peter's good suggestion, you might also take a look at my 12-page white paper called Personalized Dynamic Content.

I wrote this to supplement the online documentation and it offers more scenarios and examples.

Thanks

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

Evergreen, Colorado

www.showmethedemo.com

[bilbob59719500]

Thanks to you both for your responses.  I didn't appreciate how detailed the sample projects were.  However, I'm still struggling I think with the logic involved in build expressions, which might be why the behaviour is not what I'm expecting.  There doesn't seem to be anyway to group statements using parenthesis. The Adobe help indicates that AND takes precedence, but doesn't really explain what that means in this context. In my build expression, I have something like this:

VerA OR Module1 OR Module2 AND NOT VerB

Which I would expect to return everything without a tag against it, and also return any content with any of the following tags VerA, Module1, or Module2, but hide any content with the VerB tag (even if it had Module1 or Module2 tags applied at the TOC or Topic level).

Although, now that I've written that out, I suppose it makes sense that the VerB content is being displayed, but I guess I'm confused because the VerA and VerB conditional builds/filters work as expected when just viewing a child project, it only breaks once merged.

Any other thought, greatly appreciated!

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

There is a page on my site about Build Expressions

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[johndaigle]

Hi, Regarding your comment about "The Adobe help indicates that AND takes precedence," I'm not sure in what context you are finding this. Are you talking about "AND Search" in the search engine or the "AND Boolean Operator" in a conditional build expression?

This section of the live online help refers to AND Search.

This section discusses Advanced Conditional Build Tag Expressions.

Also, can you be specific about your merged parent/child behavior scenarios in light of your comment about "...builds/filters work as expected when just viewing a child project, it only breaks once merged." I believe Peter mentioned he was working with Adobe engineers on a possible merged help issue involving DCF in child projects. Perhaps he can shed some light on recent developments in that regard.

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

Evergreen, Colorado

www.showmethedemo.com

[bilbob59719500]

Ok, that's very interesting about the issue with child projects because as I've said, I get things to work the way I want outside of the merged project, but once merged, in-topic conditions seem to get ignored. I've created a zip of three sample projects (a master and two children). If you open them up, you can see that they build fine and if you build the child outside the merged project, tags work how I want them. However, once merged, at the book and topic levels, things work fine, but the same tags applied to specific paragraphs within a topic are being ignored or displayed incorrectly.

Below is a link to a location with zipped versions of the projects. I think I've named topics with obvious enough names for you to work out what I'm trying to accomplish:

https://web.tresorit.com/l#E3DCoykikq74O6aqiepT0A

I'd really appreciate any further advice.

Regards,

Sam

[Peter Grainge]

The issues with merged responsive help were not DCF related. I have downloaded your files but I'm not sure I will be able to look before I become unavailable for a while. Will try.

There are three zips so I will not be able to see how you have structured them. I have a hunch your issue is that you are not following the merge setup I use as described on my site. See Merged WebHelp and HTML5 Help.

Also your tagging needs to be on the topics, not the TOC. Leave that untagged as the filtering will take care of the TOC.

Take a look at that, try the structure I suggest and post back if you are still having issues.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

[bilbob59719500]

Thanks everyone for your continued support.  With the suggestions above, I discovered a bit of a flaw in my logic in the build conditions. However, I was still getting unexpected behaviour when I built the project and previewed it locally. This morning I was having an issue with our existing help system (built using Doc to Help) where content was displaying as expected locally but not once it was on the server. After I resolved that, I thought, maybe my RoboHelp issue is that it isn't displaying as expected locally, but it works once on a proper server, and lo-and-behold, it works as expected!

I had tried the output on the server previously, but I think it fell down because of the flaws in my conditional build logic. Now that those are ironed out, the server output is working as expected, so I'm happy with that.

Thanks again for all your help. I'm marking the response with the link to the explanation of the logic in a conditional build as that ultimately solved the problem. I'll also log a case with Adobe about the local preview issue.

Regards,

Sam