Non TOC topics appear in Search

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NorthEast
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Re: Non TOC topics appear in Search

Post by NorthEast »

Interesting bug.

I always reckon you should use conditions if you want to accurately control what is and isn't in your output.

I never use "Exclude content not directly or indirectly linked to from the target", as you don't actually know what is/isn't going to be included, unless you like manually checking your output after every build.
Rona Kwestel
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Re: Non TOC topics appear in Search

Post by Rona Kwestel »

Wow, that means you need to condition every single piece of content. I'm fairly certain that would make me insane.
SteveS
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Re: Non TOC topics appear in Search

Post by SteveS »

You can apply an exclude tag to a folder to exclude everything it contains. At least you could, but I don't have access to Flare at the moment to test it. We used to do it to exclude print only topics from online help. (Don't ask, working for local government...)
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NorthEast
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Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:33 am

Re: Non TOC topics appear in Search

Post by NorthEast »

Rona Kwestel wrote:Wow, that means you need to condition every single piece of content. I'm fairly certain that would make me insane.
Well, not everything, you only need conditions on the files that you want to exclude in an output.

I find the "Exclude content ..." setting is ok as a quick and dirty way to exclude stuff, but I'd never use it to produce production content. That's because you can't actually be sure what is or isn't going to be included in the output. So you might find that a few topics get included by mistake, or omitted by mistake, and you wouldn't necessarily notice at the time. I don't have a mental map of the thousands of links in my projects, and I don't have time to check thousands of topics in the output. So I prefer to use conditions, because I can be pretty certain about what is or isn't going to be included in the output, just by looking at the source.

So "Exclude content..." might be fine for some, but I don't use it for those reasons.
Rona Kwestel
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Re: Non TOC topics appear in Search

Post by Rona Kwestel »

I guess I see your point, but it still seems like a lot of work. We have multiple targets, each of which include only a subset of the total content we maintain in our single project. In order to not pull in all the topics in any given target, I'd need to set a condition on every topic such that it would be obvious which conditions I would need to exclude for a given target to make sure the undesired topics didn't show up in the search.

Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds, assuming that you can come up with a clear "category" for, say, each folder's-worth of topics, and then exclude the irrelevant categories for any given target. I'll give it some thought when we address some other confusing conditions we currently have defined that no longer make sense.
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