MadCap Software Forums

I am new to Flare and need some advice on single sourcing, condition tags and snippets for a future large HTML database. The database will be comprised of many individual product pages that will include some information intended for only advanced users. The majority of the information in the pages will come from product documentation that will be periodically updated (think subsections here). The problem here is that the information on the topic pages is subdivided into separate areas based on the information in the subsections (think subA has info on 1, 2, and 3 areas and subB has info on 1 and 4 areas). Would it be better served to take the subsections and make them into snippets with the understanding that the snippets may then contain several sub-snippets depending on their areas of inclusion? or would it be best to manually include the various subsection information and only condition tag the information that would be excluded for some viewers?

Apologies if I am unclear in this description. We plan on having multiple outputs in the future but would like to be able to single type (ie snippet) information wherever it is logical. The problem I am running into is that we now have a large number of snippets to deal with and we are only about 25% complete on the database build. Is it possible to have too many snippets built into individual topics? Does that risk issues in the future?

Snippets and conditions are used for different purposes:

* Use snippets for any text which is repeated in multiple places.
Snippets can also include conditional text, and you can choose to exclude these by (a) setting snippet conditions for a topic, and (b) setting conditions for a target.

* Set conditions (on a target) for any content that needs to be excluded from a particular target.

* Set snippet conditions (on a topic) for any content in a snippet that needs to be excluded from a particular topic.

Thanks Dave but do you have any experience in managing large projects with very large numbers of snippets?

In the project I am working on each product would need to have many, many separate snippets as even shared statements among products cannot share a snippet as the shared statement may not be updated in a product documentation revision on every product concurrently. Would this ever be a concern for FLARE to handle or just an organization issue for the build/maintenance?

shloter wrote:Thanks Dave but do you have any experience in managing large projects with very large numbers of snippets?

In the project I am working on each product would need to have many, many separate snippets as even shared statements among products cannot share a snippet as the shared statement may not be updated in a product documentation revision on every product concurrently. Would this ever be a concern for FLARE to handle or just an organization issue for the build/maintenance?

We've got a project with 1200 snippets, and we use snippets inside snippets.
The snippets also use both regular conditions (set at target level) and snippet conditions (set at topic level).

What I was trying to suggest is that it's not a case of using snippets or conditions; it's probably going to be a combination.
But first I'd suggest trying these out to understand how they work - i.e. snippets, conditions (at target level), and snippet conditions (at topic level).
Once you know how they work, you'll have a better idea of the best approach for your particular scenario.