Change TOC structure

[chenyu]

I have a TOC in my Project Orgnizer. Now I need to change the TOC structure. Is there any way I can change the locations of several topics simultaneously, instead drag each topic one by one?

[RamonS]

I don't know if you can drag books, but it is worth a try. Other than that, i don't see how dragging multiple topics would work. How is Flare supposed to know where to put them? Are they all supposed to go to the same place?

[chenyu]

RamonS, Thanks for your reply. Let me explain my question more clearly. I have a TOC Like this:



Now I want to change the TOC structure to:



but what I can do is only to drag the topic one by one, like this:



Can I drag all the topics through Section 3 to Section 10 together?

Thanks!

[Andrew]

Were it me, I'd probably open the TOC in a text editor and copy / paste the whole group of TOC entries from one "level" of nodes in the XML to the one you want, but I'm fairly comfortable with XML.

[ChoccieMuffin]

In one of the menu bars along the top there are arrows. If you hover your cursor over them you should see useful tooltips. If you highlight the topic (or possibly topics) and then click on the arrow that says "Move item to the left" it should move the topics first of all to the same level as "Procedures" in your structure. Then click on the arrow again to move the topics to the next level left, i.e. the same as Section 1 and Section 2.

Note that I'm new, and I might have the wrong end of the stick, but it's worth a try.

[schultza]

chenyu, did you get any further on this? I am a newbie to Flare, and am also looking for this functionality as we import documents from Author-it (where we had this functionality) to Flare.

Thanks!

[lacastle]

If you have folders visable in the content explorer, you can select more than one topic at a time, but i don't think it's possible in the TOC.

[schultza]

Thanks for the suggestion, but you can only select one item at a time in Content Explorere as well.

[lacastle]

If you click the View Files icon at the top of the Content Explorer, the Content Explorer window will split and you can select multiple items on the right-half of the window.

[LTinker68]

If you have folders visable in the content explorer, you can select more than one topic at a time, but i don't think it's possible in the TOC.

If you set the TOC Editor to tree view then you can select more than one TOC entry. Actually, even when you're not in tree view you can Shift+select and Ctrl+select multiple TOC entries.

[lacastle]

If you have folders visable in the content explorer, you can select more than one topic at a time, but i don't think it's possible in the TOC.

If you set the TOC Editor to tree view then you can select more than one TOC entry.

i forgot about that one. it's kind of hard to read the TOC in tree view, but it may be the solution in this case.

[i-tietz]

Honestly - changing things in the text editor is the easiest and fastest way. It's not really dangerous, because the structure of this file is so simple:

1. Right-click on the TOC in the Project Organizer
2. Chose Open with | Internal Text Editor

Then it looks like this:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CatapultToc Version="1">
    <TocEntry Title="Start" Link="/Content/start.htm" />
    <TocEntry Title="book1">
        <TocEntry Title="book2">
            <TocEntry Title="page2-1" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
        </TocEntry>
        <TocEntry Title="book3">
            <TocEntry Title="page3-1" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-2" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-3" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-4" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-5" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-6" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-7" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-8" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
            <TocEntry Title="page3-9" Link="/Content/dummy.htm" />
        </TocEntry>
    </TocEntry>
</CatapultToc>

3. You select the entries you want to transfer to the other location.
4. You cut those entries and paste them at the new location.

[LTinker68]

It's not really dangerous...

Other than the fact that it's easy to miss selecting the beginning or end tag of a line and if you do that then you won't be able to open the file in normal view.

[i-tietz]

dah ...
That's also possible when you're trying to create a snippet, or when you drag a snippet into the topic or when you drag elements into a dropdown and they land in between the head and the body, or ...

In short: If somebody is afraid of something like this they should stop working with Flare.

[RamonS]

In short: If somebody is afraid of something like this they should stop working with Flare.

That's cold!

[i-tietz]

And true.
In the past three years I've seen all sorts of mistakes you can make using Flare in the XML editor. Some of them were hard to find and correct or to be worked around. If you put up with all this, selecting lines that have a simple structure like that, is like eating icecream ...