Need Education - Relationship Tables

[WebGirlie]

Hi Everyone,

Based on what I've seen and the few concepts that have managed to sink into my tiny little head, I think that the relationship tables in Flare 5 may be a gift from the Universe for the API documentation set that I'm reworking. However, the key phrase above is "tiny little head". While I can understand the concept of it, I'm having an impossible time really visualizing it and the documentation doesn't seem to help me. What would help greatly is seeing not just the procedure but the results.

Does anybody know of a tutorial or an example of the output online anywhere that I could look at it?

Thanks so much and Happy Thursday,

MB

[forfear]

Scott of http://www.clickstart.net and creator of the MadSkills training material for Flare is probably prepping up and finishing up a new version of his book and certification test for Flare v5. You might wanna have a look at that when it becomes available. i think he made a post somewhere only just recently about this.

[DurtyMat]

wow, havent been on the forums, and i was actually hoping to run into someone that needed info on relationship tables, no really ... i've got issues ....


anyway ... relationship tables are pretty sweet and i thats where i spent a lot of my time tooling around during the beta. relationship tables are kind of flexible, as far as an example, i dont really have anything created online, but i can try and get some of the posts I created when I was testing how relationship tables worked and what I could do to chop them up and place them all over a topic ... which unfortunatly didn't work.

gimme a little time on this

[forfear]

[forfear]

Hi!
There is a new DITA 101 book by Ann Rockley. get the ebook version, the budget is about right in this economic condition for under 10USD for a 150++ page book.

[DurtyMat]

Ok, so after re-reading your post, my thread(s) in the beta forum might not be exactly what you are looking for ... i wanted to create some really advanced outputs with my relationship table cut up and placed throughout a topic instead of in one section, which I was unsuccessful with and eventually put a feature request in. however i do know the following:

To create a new relationship heading for your topics (instead of the default headings), you ....

1. Open your stylesheet and find the MadCap | relationshipsHeading
2. Right-click it and select Add Class
3. Name this class whatever you want to call the heading ... example: What Next, Before you Start, Additional Resources, etc.
4. Modify the style properties to your liking ... if you dont change anything it will use the default relationship heading properties
5. Open your Relationship Table (or create one by right-clicking the Project/Advanced folder)
6. Insert a new column (the button can be clicked after clicking inside of an existing cell)
7. Name the new column the same name as the style

ta-da!

The basic idea is organize your topics into different categories, concept, reference, and task (procedures / processes) and create additional categories if needed. We are using concept topics as intro topics, tasks for procedures which are broken down into before you start / whats next, and reference (field and button descriptions).

if you have any more questions, please ask, hopefully we will both learn something in the process

[DurtyMat]

for fear's link googlized