How to Prevent Conditional Topics from Appearing in Search

[wercampbells]

I have a RoboHelp project to which I have applied conditional build tags. The purpose is to hide these topics from the generated output. Everything works fine except when I do a search on terms related to the hidden topics, the search results list the topic names. By the way, I still have the topics listed in my Table of Contents with the conditional build tags applied there too. How can I prevent conditional topics from appearing in Search? Thanks for your assistance.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Are you seeing the conditioned topics in the generated ToC? You should only see them in project’s ToC, not the output. When you generated, did you select the “don’t reference any unreferenced topics” or something like that?

[wercampbells]

I do not see the conditional topics in the generated TOC, I only see them in the project's TOC. I also selected "Exclude Unreferenced Topics From Output."  Any other ideas?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Well, the first part is working as designed – you should only see the conditionalized entries in the project ToC. I’m not getting the second result & I know that I’ve not got the “Exclude Unreferenced Topics…” flag turned on in the output I just tested.

[wercampbells]

Hi Jeff,

I learned a valuable lesson. I applied the conditional build tags to the topics in Project Manager and that solved the problem. Previously, I had just had the tags applied at the project's TOC. Thanks so much for your advice.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Ah, that would be the difference all right – I’ve got CBTs applied to both the content of topics and to entire topics themselves.

[Captiv8r]

Hi folks

Just a note to say that you really should only ever need to apply the tag to the topics themselves. If the topic has been "left behind" because of the build expression, tagging the TOC as well is quite simply overkill.

Cheers... Rick