Snippets & User Defined Variables

[paulh11705604]

After ~5 years of not working with any HAT, I began a new position on 3/28/2016 and am giving the RH 2015 trial a spin. I'm really excited by what I see and have been able to do thus far.

I have 3 “entities” to write about and I have created 3 pages, one page per entity.

On each of these overview pages, I have this first sentence:

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This section describes how to enter and manage [entity].

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I’ve defined each [entity] as a user defined variable. I hard coded each page with this sentence and added a reference to the User Defined Variable and then generated the output. Works awesome.

Now, I’m going ‘down’ a level. What I want to figure out is how to make

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“This section describes how to enter and manage”

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be a snippet. I want it to be a snippet because when I write a better sentence, I don’t have to make the same change on each of these overview pages. Eventually, there will be 19 overview pages.

Does anyone else structure their content like this?

What I want to avoid is making multiple manual changes. For example, if the following examples were in a RoboHelp project, on https://support.assessment.pearson.com/x/N4Dy, there is this sentence:

This section tells you how to manage user accounts.

On this page - Manage Paper Tests - PearsonAccess Next Online User Guide - Pearson Assessment Support - there is this sentence:

This section covers all of the unique aspects of paper testing.

What I am trying to do is have a snippet that is defined as:

This section tells you how to

and refer to it on both pages.

On the first page, it would say

<snippet>This section tells you how to</endSnippet>

<beginUserDefinedVariable>manage user accounts</endUserDefinedVariable>.

Then on the second page, it would say this:

<snippet>This section tells you how to</endSnippet>

<beginUserDefinedVariable> manage paper testing</endUserDefinedVariable>.

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The reason I want it as a snippet is because I don't want to have to maintain "This section tells you how to" as hard-coded text on each of these overview pages. I want to leverage the content reuse functionality to avoid a bunch of copy / paste or even find / replace.

Thanks for any help!

Paul Hanson

RoboHelp MVP from a looonnngggg time ago....

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

I think the problem that you'll run into is that snippets can't be in line with other text (AFAIK), so as far as your example goes, you could have "Snippet" then a new line, then the UDV and more text, but you couldn't "run in" the "snippet UDV text" all in one line.

[paulh11705604]

Okay – that was a limitation when I tried to do this in Confluence. Rats.

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

But what you might consider is another variable to hold the text you want in the snippet. That could be inserted inline. Then you update it only in the variable.

Just thinking out loud a bit.

Cheers... Rick