8 targets, one project, 6 condition tags.

[Eric Lachance]

Hey all,

I'm probably going to have to call tech support on this one, but just in case, I'm going to ask here in case someone has run into this sort of problem before. This is more or less in reference to this post, which turned out to be a misinterpretation on my part.

Our plan is to convert our previous documentation from multiple legacy sources into combined Flare projects, for the same software. We have a reference guide and user guide for the same software and want to generate both the PDF and WebHelp. On top of that, we would love to be able to output version-specific documentation, for, say, 7.0 and 7.1 separately. All this, in a single Flare project.

Here are the 6 conditions that I created:

• Versions.7-0-Only
• Versions.7-1-Only
• OutputType.PrintOnly (PDF)
• OutputType.ScreenOnly (WebHelp)
• GuideType.UserGuide
• GuideType.ReferenceGuide

This leads to a 8 different output targets that combine them:

• Version 7.0 Online User Guide
• Version 7.0 Online Reference Guide
• Version 7.0 PDF User Guide
• Version 7.0 PDF Reference Guide
• Version 7.1 Online User Guide
• Version 7.1 Online Reference Guide
• Version 7.1 PDF User Guide
• Version 7.1 PDF Reference Guide

Within the project, there are multiple topics (in the end, this may include in excess of 750 different topics), and each topic can have, for each tag set (Versions, OutputType, GuideType) either no tag specified, one, or both. Obviously we would never include both 7.0 and 7.1, nor Reference Guide and User Guide - in these cases we would simply not put a tag at all.

But we do have topics that would refer specifically to, say, the Reference Guide in version 7.1; the User Guide in PDF Format; the WebHelp for version 7.0.

These condition tags can be available at any level: in the TOC Topic, a TOC Chapter, a paragraph, and potentially even a sentence or word (in a <span>). Using multiple table of contents may work for issues with topic inclusion, but not when the conditions are within the topic.

Because we're grabbing multiple tags, the issue that arises is this: if we include one tag and exclude another, include takes precedence. While this would not cause any problem for someone that has a single, simple user guide for one software, in one version (where the only conditions are for PDF VS WebHelp as an example), it simply does not work for us as I'm seeing it.

Has anyone ever encountered such a situation, and can offer any advice on how to proceed? I definitely do not want to maintain 4 separate projects, but perhaps I'm going at it completely in the wrong way and the solution is obvious to someone else?

I've attached an example (generic) project that shows precisely the issue I'm encountering (try generating the Web-Reference-71 output or the PDF-User-70 output).

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Andrew]

I'm not sure I fully understand what's going on in your case, but at first blush it sounds like you are under the impression that if you do not select "include" that your content will not be included (this is an extremely common misunderstanding for folks fairly new to Flare).

If you do not want to exclude a particular topic, simply do not select any condition, and it will be included by default. The only reason to use the "include" option is if the part you want to include also has an excluded condition applied to it. For example, perhaps you've excluded a paragraph, but you still need one sentence from it. Or you have a topic that would normally be excluded, but you need to include it for some particular target. Eh, those aren't very good examples, but hopefully you get the gist: "include" overrides "exclude."

[Eric Lachance]

Hi Andrew,

You may have given me something to work with, let me test the theory.

[Eric Lachance]

Andrew, you're a life saver. You put it as no one had before, and it's exactly what I needed realize:

The only reason to use the "include" option is if the part you want to include also has an excluded condition applied to it.

I was always checking the "include" on my output, and I shouldn't have. Removing all the "include" tags fixed the issue, permanently.

Man, you just resolved about 3 weeks of turning in circles and hitting my head on the wall. You deserve a commendation

[Andrew]

Glad I could help -- this is one of the top 3 questions / confusions we see in this forum. If I hadn't answered it, someone else most certainly would have!

[Eric Lachance]

I am re-posting in this topic because I realize that, though Andrew gave a good solution to my problem which I understood, the original project I uploaded wasn't uploaded with this solution. So, anyone that stumbles upon this topic and doesn't have the same background information and me and Andrew now have may have difficulty catching on.

The project I am attaching to this post is different than the original one because what prompted me to create it was a different set of requirements: both our software suites, starting the next major release, will be built using the same core programming. They were already similar in what they did (one being more advanced than the other) but were developed by two different teams and didn't have much in common in terms of functionality. Now that one suite becomes somewhat of a subset of the other (a "basic" suite if you will), we have to merge everything in one project and output all the manuals from that single project. This saves on management, maintenance and translation costs.

I was scare though because last time I had tried I had a really hard time getting it to work - we ended up merging the User and Reference manuals together so the complexity was not the same as my original post intended.

Anyways, the attached project contains a few files that can generate 8 outputs: 2 different software that share some functionality, in two target types (webhelp and pdf) in two different versions (version 1.0 and 1.1) so we can still generate output for "older" versions. So we have 6 condition tags, a couple of variables and 8 targets.

One detail: For some reason, whether I put the Include tags or not, in version 6.1 of Flare I get the same output. Either the software has changed how it deals with conditions, or it's only different because I added tags to the html files and used separate ToC files for the two software. Either way, it works so I'm happy and you should be to!

Enjoy!

[i-tietz]

In our main condition tag set we have 6 conditions: 5 for different products, 1 for NotInMaster, means: parts with this condition are excluded in each of our targets, because it belongs to the next master or version.
And we have 3 main projects: 2 projects with one of those main conditions, 1 project with the other three conditions.
And we we use Source Control. Some of the topics are part of all projects, some are part of two projects, some are part of one project only. We have folders for those topics and "branch" those folders in the Source Control software rather than having all the topics in each of the projects and then having to exclude them by condition. Rumour has it that you can simulate something like that in Flare: It's called Global Project Linking.