Single sourcing test scripts from exercises

[dorcutt]

Hello all,

I'm faced with a bit of a conundrum. I (apparently) need to develop very basic test scripts based off of user exercises in very short fashion (we're a very small shop), and was wondering if anyone had dealt with this before.

The only thing that I can think of is creating a new target with a separate, more succinct stylesheet with smaller styles in general, large images set to display: none, etc, but I'd also have to hide large amounts of text by wrapping them with yet another span/div class (probably a general class like ExOnly or NoScript).

Is this a fools errand, and should I just develop and maintain a separate doc of test scripts? My overall project is getting rather complicated, and this would basically double the output targets because it'd make a test script for each of the exercise/manual documents.

I know it's hard to tell for certain without knowing a whole lot more, but I thought I'd put a feeler out to see if anyone has invented this particular wheel before me.

[doc_guy]

Can you use conditions to mark which scripts should be included in one output and which shouldn't?

[ChoccieMuffin]

Building on Paul's suggestion:

Add a new target for test scripts, as you suggested, but you don't need to mess about with a different stylesheet, you can use conditions instead.

In your conditions, add a condition called ExcludeFromTest, or similar.

In your topics, apply the new condition to bits that, surprisingly, don't need to be in the test scripts. (Apply this condition to the graphics you don't want to include as well as the text.) You can also apply the condition in the TOC to exclude entire topics rather than just individual paragraphs.

In your target, set ExcludeFromTest condition to Excluded.

That's HOW to do it, but WHETHER to do it is a question only you can answer, as only you know the amount of work that would be needed.
Let us know how you get on.

Hope that helps.

[dorcutt]

Hey, thanks for the replies.

Conditions were my first thought as well of course, but this would basically mean marking up the entire document extensively and I'm concerned about readability with conditions. Also, I'm red-green colorblind, so this adds significantly to my hesitancy to use new conditions. I just can't differentiate as many colors as most people can, and hovering over the block of color at the start of the tag to get the condition name is not very practical. A span would be invisible when editing my content, which is pretty important. I suppose I could do white colored conditions, but that would still make those little colored blocks flagging conditions to be halved or quartered.

Also, styles would definitely have to be changed. Due to a legacy content that I inherited, my styles can be quite large (14 point bold headings for "steps" or groups of actions). The exercises are just not nearly as compact as test scripts need to be, so my choices are either to use a new stylesheet or to create a new medium, which seems wrong to me. That is another advantage of the <span class="action/result"> method... I can set the formatting exactly as I want, regardless of the formatting of the element that the text is actually contained in.

Maybe I'm just over-thinking it and the condition tag is indeed the correct way to go.

Anyway, I'll probably just end up making do by modifying the existing legacy word documentation for now, and work on a longer term solution after this deadline.

[Sylverre]

Another vote for conditions here. Readability won't be an issue for anyone except you and whoever else in your small shop working directly in Flare. As far as the colors go, you can change a condition's background color from the tag window, and though I imagine red-green colorblind limits your choices, you might find enough viewable hues--or spend more time than the rest of us hovering your mouse over conditioned text to check the tags, sorry .

Good luck!

[ToddPh]

Perhaps there is a feature request in there for MadCap: provide an option to mark conditions with a pattern and/or color.

[dorcutt]

Patterns could be helpful.

What I'd like is the ability to have a label that is "always on" as opposed to needing to hover over it, or better yet, a keyboard command to cause all hovertext items to appear. This would also be useful when looking up a lot of image filepaths.

[doc_guy]

Also, remember that in Flare 10, you can now "filter" the XML editor view based on conditions. So, if you set up the proper view conditions on the topic when you open it, you'll only see the properly-applied conditions (as well as all content with no conditions applied).

[ChoccieMuffin]

Put in a feature request. (Linky is in my footer.)

[dorcutt]

As an update, for now I've decided to create a separate target and set of topics for the short term task because the content is different enough. Still not decided about the longer term one. I'll modify one topic using conditions and one using classed spans as a test. If I can do what I need to do with conditions, I'll do that.

And thanks, I'll definitely fill out that feature request report when I get a chance. There are quite a lot of us red-green colorblind folks out there.

[ChoccieMuffin]

In order to use spans, you'd have to use conditions, or have I completely misunderstood?