Child WebHelp contains ALL parent topics

[Bill Stevens]

Help!

This is my first attempt at single-sourcing. My aim is to produce several product-specific WebHelp systems from one Flare project.

In my Flare project I have topics specific to individual products and topics common to all products. I have successfully generated the individual child WebHelp systems, BUT when I tested the Search feature, the resultant list showed topics for ALL products. When I examined the output files from Flare, ALL the project's topics were present.

So far, I have created product-specific Skins, WebHelp Targets, TOCs and Master pages.

I was expecting that the Flare compiler would look at the required TOC and only use topics to produce the output. In my subsequent investigations I noticed that all my topics have the "Include topic when full-text search database is generated" (Properties => Topic Properties) set to yes. Is this causing the WebHelp compiler to include ALL topics?

Any help to resolve this problem appreciated.

Bill

[Judith]

Flare includes all your topics and resources in the build unless you specifically exclude them. This doesn't matter in printed output because you end up with what's in the toc and nothing else. But in a help system, you can end up with a lot of extra stuff, including old graphics and topics that you don't use any more.

When single-sourcing for parent and child help, I create a condition tag for each child target and an "Exclude all" condition tag, which I apply to the top level folder(s). Then for each child target, I exclude the "Exclude all" condition and include the child-specific tag(s) I want in that help.

You can apply the condition tags to individual topics or groups of topics in a folder, or to bits of text within a topic. If you plan it carefully, it's not too much work.

I also use analyzer to look for topics and pictures that aren't included in any tocs, so I can decide what to do with them.


Judith

[NorthEast]

Hi Bill.
Your WebHelp outputs will include all of the files in the project (topics, images, stylesheets, etc), not just the topics that are linked to from the TOC.

To limit what is included in each output you need to use condition tags. For example, create a separate condition tag for each output, apply it to the files that are specific to that output, and then in your other targets set that condition tag to 'exclude'. You wouldn't apply condition tags to any shared content that you want in all outputs, e.g. stylesheets. One tip is that you can apply condition tags to folders, which might make things quicker.

[Bill Stevens]

Hi Judith and Lee,

Thank you for your solution; this is the final(?) piece to the great jigsaw puzzle of single-sourcing. I have setup the required Condition tags and I am now applying them to my topics.

Cheers
Bill