My goal here is to create a "help center," that is, a help "home page" with links to help for all of our products. (As well as PDFs, videos, and other resources). I have my content repository set up thusly:
The main folder contains a few common content files, as well as the "home" page
Sub-folders in both the Content and Images folder for the product-specific content
One variable set with definitions for each product defined
Targets for each product, both PDF and HTML5. In each, variable definitions are specified for that target
In the "help home" target, I have a TOC that does nothing more that contain the product TOCs. This looked like it worked wonderfully. I have a TOC in the output with the top level as the separate products. It's impressing a lot of people here.
The thing is, I can define variable definitions in the "help home" target. But it is those definitions that end up being used throughout the output. And in the Properties of the TOCs themselves and the references to the TOCs in the "home" TOC, I can't define variable definitions. So in 2 of the 3 sets of product content, the wrong variables are used.
There is a workaround: I can use a snippet. The snippet contains just a variable. And then when I insert the snippet, I can define the snippet-level variable.
But, this is a PITA.
That means that every single time I want to insert a variable--and there are variables _everywhere_ in my content set--it means that I have to not insert a variable, but instead remember to insert a snippet, and then open that snippet's settings and set the proper snippet variable (a process that I also found is buggy, which means I have to test to make sure it actually has done what I told it to do). And I also have to go find every single variable that I've already inserted throughout my content set and change them to snippets (most of which I'd have to create). That's a whole lot of work, necessary work, in my view.
So my questions:
Is there a different way to approach this?
Is there something that Flare does that I'm missing that would alleviate this?
Is the idea of building a "home" page that just references TOCs the wrong one?
Any other suggestions welcome.