My company is in the process of switching over to Flare for managing/publishing our help center and we're in the final stages of testing and tweaking before finally pushing the site live.
Because of our specific needs, we would like to maintain both a master TOC containing our entire database and individual TOCs for each of our products/manuals. Ideally, the master TOC would be used for the side/top navs of the help center site while the individual TOCs would be reserved for less common uses (printing, .chm files for our desktop products, etc).
In the interest of single-sourcing, I've tried a setup where the master TOC links to individual TOCs while the individual TOCs link to our actual topics. Basically, the master TOC is a hub where all other TOCs are gathered/organized. I was hoping that this setup would enable me to only need to make TOC changes in one place, but it seems to be causing problems with site navigation. The drop-downs in the top nav have unnecessary duplicate children (Loans > Loan Reports > Loan Reports, for example), but at least those links work properly. The selections in the side nav won't open at all (click on Loan Reports under Loans and nothing happens, the link description says javascript:void(0);).
Bottom line, I'm wondering whether Flare is able to accommodate my TOC single-sourcing wishes...or whether I just need to suck it up, put all of our topic links in the master TOC, and plan on making TOC updates in two places going forward.
Thank you in advance for your insight.
Issues when TOCs are nested in master TOC
Re: Issues when TOCs are nested in master TOC
If anyone stumbles across this topic wondering the same thing, I posted this question in the Slack channel and was given this answer:
I suspect that you need to set a particular option for each of the linked "subTOCs" (that's my homegrown term) in the master TOC. ON the master TOC, right-click a linked subTOC and open its properties. On the Advanced tab, select the "When merging, replace node with merged TOC." That will eliminate the redundant heading in the output's navigation. Do this for each linked subTOC. That's it.
I need to do more testing, but at first glance this seems to have solved my major issues with how the TOCs interact.
I suspect that you need to set a particular option for each of the linked "subTOCs" (that's my homegrown term) in the master TOC. ON the master TOC, right-click a linked subTOC and open its properties. On the Advanced tab, select the "When merging, replace node with merged TOC." That will eliminate the redundant heading in the output's navigation. Do this for each linked subTOC. That's it.
I need to do more testing, but at first glance this seems to have solved my major issues with how the TOCs interact.