Trying to better understand top nav and toc

[bboursaw]

Hello all,

This is a very basic question, I'm sure - but I'm trying to ensure I have a good understanding of this before building out a ton of stuff incorrectly.

I am taking a PDF project I've had for a few years now and am converting that over to Top Nav. I have read through the docs on converting the TOC and it totally makes sense that you want to keep the top level items down to a minimum so they fit across the top of the page as a single line and limit to 3 subs of each menu menu item. The question I have is related to how the remaining topics are structured (given there are quite a few). With my PDF TOC, I have many books within my TOC,which doesn't seem like the way to go now. So my thought is that I will have 6 (I've come up with) main books in the TOC which will represent my 6 main menu items on the page. Where I'm getting caught up is ... can I still have as many folders/books under each main, with the understanding that I'm limiting the menu from displaying more than 3, in the view of the web page?

Or, should/can I simply just add however many individual topics I need within each of the main 6 books that display within my TOC? I guess I am trying to figure out how much of this is simply organization from the perspective of the person that has to manage all of the topics vs. how it will physically translate to what displays in the final web output?

Not sure if this makes sense, but any direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Bob

[NorthEast]

Firstly, if you have Flare 2018, and your project has a large TOC, then I'd strongly recommend looking at the new side nav to compare that with top nav.

Where I'm getting caught up is ... can I still have as many folders/books under each main, with the understanding that I'm limiting the menu from displaying more than 3, in the view of the web page?

Yeah, in the skin Setup you can control the number of levels to display in the top nav's menu (I only use 2). The TOC can be as large as you want, but the top nav menu will only show the number of levels you set here.

If your TOC is larger than you've chosen to display in the top nav menu, this is where you need to use a menu proxy to navigate deeper into the TOC. To see an example, look at the right hand menu in the Flare 2017r2 help), which uses a context-sensitive menu proxy. Usually, you'd put the menu proxy in your master page.