Single-sourcing for different page layout configurations?

[CATERAF]

Hi,

Firstly, apologies if this has been covered elsewhere -- I don't know what I should be searching for to solve my dilemma!

I am doing a maintenance manual, but part of this requires having 2 things:
1. A schedule matrix of what items need scheduling and whether they are done daily, monthly, yearly etc:
E.g. (3 columns - item, daily and monthly. Sorry -- the spaces I added to show the table didn't work so I added commas between columns)
Item, Daily , Monthly
1, Yes, Yes
2, No, Yes
3, Yes, Yes

2. A checklist of items for each time-period (i.e., 1 checklist for daily, 1 for monthly etc). (4 columns - daily, completed, by, comments)
E.g.,
Daily , Completed? , By: , Comments
Item 1 , Yes , Bob
Item 2 , Yes , Bob
Item 3 , No , Bob , Doesn't need replacing.

The problem is that the items identified in the matrix need to be taken and restructed for each checklist. I want the matrix and the checklist to be single-sourced because as soon as I update daily items on the matrix the checklist will be wrong, and vice versa.

Has anyone come across this problem before?
I'm stuck as to where to even look.. I have a few 'ideas' but none I'm sure would work.

Thanks,
Avril

[Msquared]

Could you do this with snippet conditions? If there's a one-to-one correspondence between the order in both lists, that may work.

Create one "super-snippet", which has all the info, and conditionalise each part depending on which output(s) it is required for. Then apply the appropriate snippet conditions to the topics.

You may even be able to do this if there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between the content. If all your related content is in one file (the snippet file), then at least if you change it, you can see all the other information that may be affected even if it's just duplicated in another conditional block elsewhere in the snippet. Snippet conditions can get very messy, so my advice is to keep the conditionals as simple as possible.

Alternative approach. Use separate topics for the schedule and for each checklist, but at the top of each, apply a "Comment" codition (always excluded from all targets at build time) saying "Warning! Related content is topics xxx, yyy etc. Any changes here need to be applied there too". This may be less convoluted that the snippet conditions approach.

Notes, if you opt for the snippet conditions approach.

1) You will need to place each snippet in a different topic, since you apply snippet conditions at TOPIC level (I thank MadCap have got this wrong, but, hey, that's a topic for a different post!). To set snippet conditions on a topic, use the Snippet Conditions tab on the topic properties.

20 Make sure you define separate snippet conditions, in a separate condition set file and only EVER use them as snippet conditions. Flare will allow you to apply them at target level too, and you can get in a real mess then, as anything you exclude at target level will be excluded from your output even if you didn't intend to exclude it when you placed the snippet in a topic. But anything you exclude at topic level won't make it to your final output even if you include it at target level. Ensure that all your targets are set to always include all snippet conditions!

3) As with all conditions, if your content is translated, be careful and don't get too clever with the conditional structure. Translators don't like conditions on anything less than complete sentences.

[CATERAF]

Thanks very much for your response!
It's a great idea to use snippet conditions - I can't believe it didn't occur to me since I've already used snippet conditions elsewhere in my manuals! I do think it's a little messy to use but it helps with upkeep of the manuals. If I had to put everything in manually now it would leave plenty of room for error (both now and later when I come to changes).

I do think that this problem could be solved if I could snippet table rows/cells individually so will submit a feature request for that.

As for my current short-term solution this will work perfectly!

Thanks,
Avril

[Msquared]

I've already submitted a feature request to support table rows as snippets. Plese join me!

You can put snippets in table cells as snippet text, or, I think, snippet blocks. You just can't make a snippet of a whole row, which is extremely frustrating as I've got a large number of tables where half a dozen of the rows are repeated in many tables.

[CATERAF]

Yep, will do the feature request!

Also, you can make a block of cells a snippet but when you insert this into a table it inserts it as a block rather than as separate rows (at least, that's what it seemed to do for me).
Still not ideal either way.

Thanks for your response!

Avril