Can you associate multiple identifiers with one topic?

[phebert]

Hello,

I'm hoping for some guidance in regards to building the Alias file for our HTML Help target. I'm using Flare 10.2 on a Windows 8 machine for a bit of background. The application I document is set up with several menus that can be thought of as separate modules within the application. I have one topic, How to Search, that applies to many of the functions within each menu option. What is curious is that when Find is selected in any window, the function is the same, the layout of the window is the same, the only difference is that the title on the window is different.

When creating the Alias file, can I create an identifier unique to the window title for the same topic? So, the alias file would have Select Customer as the identifier and the topic is How to Search, Select an Open Order is the identifier and the topic is How to Search. The developers I'm working with requested an Excel spreadsheet of just the identifiers, topic name and Value. I also do not have a test environment where I could try this out and see what happens so I'm reluctant to do this in the actual Alias file in case it causes problems. Would it be more straight forward to create multiple topics called the window name that I essentially copy the content of the How to search topic into?

I certainly don't want to make a task that could be straight forward into something convoluted and difficult and in the absence of a true test environment, I don't want to find out there's a problem from the live application. Any thoughts or words of wisdom are greatly appreciated.

[wclass]

Yes, one help topic can be called from many different screens using CSH.
You need an identifier for each possible screen/dialog you might call help from, and when you set up the aliases you can map many identifiers to the same topic.

[RamonS]

...or use one ID for the one alias. Maybe I misunderstand, but I see no reason to associate multiple unique (!) IDs with an alias even if it is possible. I'd expect that doing so generates more confusion going forward.

[wclass]

We usually generate the IDs from the application end, based on the screen name or something unique like that, and then we map those screens to relevant help topics. Any screen will link to only one help topic, but any help topic may be accessed from any number of screens. While developers are likely to re-use code and dialogs and hence minimise the IDs we generate, we often associate multiple IDs with one alias/topic.

[phebert]

Thanks for all the responses! I suspected that it wouldn't cause any issues but being a "seeing is believing' kind and I can't see it work with my test project, I didn't want to learn the hard way!

[RamonS]

I always forget that in some cases the IDs come from developers. On the projects I worked on it was always the other way around. My bad.