RH 2015: Getting the TOC to show topics when a filter is applied.

[WriterJeanne]

I have set up a project to test using tags and boolean expressions in filtering.

My project is a very simple arrangement of 4 books: A, B, C and D.

Each book is linked to a topic (All about A, All about B etc.), and each one contains 3 pages: Book A has pages A1, A2, A3; Book B has pages B1, B2... etc.

The All About ... topics have been tagged at the topic level as A, B, C and D. The page topics have been tagged accordingly with tags A-D and also with tags 1-3.

No tagging has been done in the TOC.

I set up filters for each tag, A-D and 1-3.

The letter filters A-D show the TOC filtered properly, but the number filters do not show any topics in the TOC unless all books are expanded before the filter is applied. In other words, the TOC does not synchronize to show all the topics that match the filter, and it does not show the books that contain topics that match the filter.

This seems odd - shouldn't the TOC display any book that contains a topic that matches a filter? Apparently, it does not display the book or any of its matching pages if the book is linked to a topic that does not match the filter.

I found two solutions:

1. If the book is linked to a topic, tag that topic with all the tags used in the topics that the book contains. Thus, I tagged my "all about" topics with 1,2 and 3 in addition to their letter tag. This fixed the problem.

2. Don't link the books to topics. Instead, just use that topic as the first page in the book (as we always had to do in the past). This also fixed the problem

Both of these will work, but if your books contain many topics with a wide variety of tags, the second option is probably more suitable.

I hope this helps anyone having difficulty with filters and TOC interaction.

[amitjha-lt]

Hi

Thanks for sharing your tips. This could be very useful to RoboHelp users.

I assume the pages you referring is part of the topic.

Just to add some insights, TOC or Book with link to Topic inherits tagging property of Topics.

That is making Filter A-D work fine. As 1-3 was tagged part of topic and TOC cannot inherit that(as not very explicit reason) hence filter 1-3 does not work.

Other solution could be to tag TOC items, tag BOOK item with 1-3 additionally and tag TOC items pointing to page with individual tag.

As tagging topics with additional tag may give wrong result on Topic content or search filter.

Thanks

Amit Jha

[WriterJeanne]

Thank you for that insight. I now understand why a book with no linked topic worked (book inherits tags from its pages), and why the book with a linked topic did not (book inherits tags from its linked topic only).

So to sum up, the solutions are now :

1. If the book is linked to a topic, tag that book in the TOC with all the tags used in the topics that the book contains. Thus, I tagged my "all about" books with 1,2 and 3 in addition to their letter tag.

2. Don't link the books to topics. Instead, just use that topic as the first page in the book (as we always had to do in the past). This also fixed the problem