Exclude content not linked directly or indirectly...

[Paul Griffiths]

I've been playing around with the Exclude content not linked directly or indirectly from the target option.

As expected, it pulls in topics that are not in the ToC but which are linked by hyperlinks or Related Topics controls. Also as expected, it omits A-linked and K-linked topics.

(I haven't tried Relationship Tables yet.)

Interestingly, if a topic is in the ToC I can still Exclude it with a condition tag, but if it's not in the ToC I can't Include it with a condition tag.

That seems odd to me.

[Nita Beck]

Interestingly, if a topic is in the ToC I can still Exclude it with a condition tag, but if it's not in the ToC I can't Include it with a condition tag.

That seems odd to me.

That doesn't seem odd to me, at least for how I design my Help systems. If you have something that is not on the TOC, I assume that someplace in some topic that is on the TOC you've got a link that will open that non-TOC topic, right? Is it that you want to have items that are not on the TOC and that are not linked from any topic but are accessible nonetheless from the index or from search? That seems really obscure to me, from the user's perspective. But then, I'm pretty dense sometimes!

[Paul Griffiths]

Hi Nita. The situation I had in mind was where the help system relied on A-linked or K-linked topics, some of which may not be included in the ToC. But I'm not denying that MadCap have provided a very useful feature.

[LTinker68]

But I'm not denying that MadCap have provided a very useful feature.

It could be that you're not considering all of the possibilities. One example of where there would be topics that aren't linked to the TOC or linked from within another topic are topics intended to be used for a form of field-level help. For example, you could have ? icons next to certain fields on your company's GUI, or a hyperlink that says "what's this for" or something like that. When the user clicks on it, it could launch a single, standalone topic in a second skin so that there's no WebHelp tri-pane. That single topic would still be in your WebHelp output folder, but not directly accessible from the main TOC. The standalone topic could even be set up to not be searched so it would only be accessible when called from your application.

So there is a lot of possibilities in having all content included by default and only excluding the content that isn't doesn't specifically apply to that output.

[NorthEast]

Just to follow-on from what LTinker said, we have topics in our help that aren't visible via the TOC/search, and are used purely for CSH calls.

We also have some content that is displayed by using our own custom javascript, so although the file may be used by a topic it is not 'linked' in a way that Flare can recognise.