Content filtered by role at log in

[ksoltys]

I may need to produce a help system (web-based) for a product whose users have multiple roles. Product management would like the help filtered by role so that the user sees on the content appropriate to his or her role. They do not want a menu for the user to select the role as one of the security requirements is that certain roles be completely hidden from end users, so the help system would have to get the user's role on log in and filter the content from that.

I know I can produce multiple separate help systems using conditional text but this gets complex when there are more than two or three roles and development would prefer to deploy only one help system.

Can this be done in Flare?

Regards
Keith

[emsachs]

I don't think you can do it with Flare's conditional text -- as far as I know, the tags for conditional text don't appear in the final output. One idea - you could try to define a number of different divs and then have development set up their server so that the divs are displayed based on role. (I don't know if that's possible, but maybe thinking in that direction will help.) They're going to have to do the security all on their end in any case, since Flare certainly does not support any kind of single sign or integration with an external authentication system.

However, using divs (or some other kind of tagging), it might be difficult for you to preview the product for the different users. Unless you can put the condition directly in the CSS for the div, so that you get the advantages of the conditional text inside Flare...

[RamonS]

While you may use the different divs to keep content apart that will not translate to different ToCs, glossaries, cross-references, and full text search. This issue comes up in the forums from time to time and the only reliable solution is using conditions and different ToCs to generate multiple outputs from the same source.
I do not know what the circumstances for you are, but I was involved in such discussions at times as well and in the end it was never a customer concern. It also depends on how the application is designed. There is a difference if additional roles just add more commands to a menu or if every page and dialog appears differently. Obviously, when there is a clear separation of features based on roles writing the help for each role is much easier.
It might be doable, but you really need to get fancy with post processing to make this work OK using one set of files and it will require additional coding in the application. Crafting and maintaining such a help system will be tremendous work and IMHO not worth the effort. Besides that, drive space is cheap so serving up multiple versions of the help should not be a big deal. Especially, when making use of a CDN (content delivery network), basically a central server that serves up common content for all instances....assuming that all customers get the same help. The app needs to call the applicable help based on current user role, which is fairly easy to implement assuming there is a global routine for calling help.