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pfos029
Inspiring
April 26, 2018
Question

Indigo TOC Help: Topic Inserted into Multiple Books Defaults to First Placement

  • April 26, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 726 views

Hi All - I just realized in my Responsive HTML5 output that my TOC isn't behaving the way I anticipated.

I am using Robohelp 2017, with the Indigo Layout.

My Issue: I have a single topic page (e.g. "Getting Started") that is placed in multiple books within my TOC. Navigation from my Indigo homepage always defaults the TOC on the right of my topic page view to display the first iteration of the topic. Using the TOC structure below, if I were to navigate to 'Book 2' from the Indigo homepage and then select the 'Getting Started' topic, the topic page opens correctly, but the TOC on the right shows the structure as being under 'Book 1'. It always defaults to the first iteration and I don't know why?

Book 1

  • Getting Started
  • Topic 2
  • Topic 3

Book 2

  • Getting Started
  • Topic 4
  • Topic 5

Book 3

  • Getting Started
  • Topic 6
  • Topic 7

Is there a work around for this? My TOC and topics are organized by role at my organization and then as the user drills down it becomes more specific. Several topic pages are shared by multiple roles, thus my decision to place a single shared topic in multiple locations. I'm not sure what to do. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 26, 2018

I suspect the only way to get around this is to create "dummy" topics that insert the contents of the Getting Started topic as a snippet. Then your TOC pointers will always cycle back to the correct location within each book.

P
pfos029Author
Inspiring
April 27, 2018

Thank you Jeff. I hadn't thought of using snippets. Do you have any recommendations for quickly looking up how many topics are re-used throughout the TOC? I have a lot of topics that are used in multiple books and I'd have to go through one by one to determine the overall impact. Any suggestions to save time to remedy my TOC navigation issue would be appreciated.

P
pfos029Author
Inspiring
April 27, 2018

@Rick - how about "placeholder" topics? ;>)


Thanks Jeff and Rick for the replies. The generated report will give me a good starting point. I had used the "Getting Started" topic as an example. Sadly I have 100+ topics that are shared, and over 1000 topic pages currently in this project. I only recently took over ownership and have been making improvements to the project. It will take time to identify all the areas where a topic is placed more than once. At least I can divide the organization by top level book using the report for organizational sake.

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