Conditions and Sanity

[EricAginity]

Conditions in Flare are really starting to make me question my sanity. We maintain multiple versions of our software (at least 4 at the moment), and then we have a subset of documentation that is also a standalone product (which also has several different flavors - although they are not at the moment part of the main product, thankfully). We are also using some of this documentation for training purposes, which requires us to add training-specific topics and content within topics (easy), and exclude things (hard, and the point of this post). I have over 2 dozen conditions that I maintain, trying to keep this project working. I have ones for version-exclusive content, ones for content that starts in a version, ones for training-only content, ones for flavor-specific content, and, frustratingly, ones that have to be combinations of these because Flare treats multi-tagged conditions as OR instead of AND, so checking the Exclude checkbox doesn't work for those.

Is there an easier way? Will MadCap ever make it easier to do this? Will I still be sane when it happens? Okay, seriously, does anyone else manage anything like this within a single project? Any suggestions on how to make this work better?

Thanks in advance.

[NorthEast]

Flare treats multi-tagged conditions as OR instead of AND, so checking the Exclude checkbox doesn't work for those.

Just to answer that part - if you use the Advanced condition option, you can use AND with conditions.

[MattyQ]

...because Flare treats multi-tagged conditions as OR instead of AND, so checking the Exclude checkbox doesn't work for those.

Using the advanced way of maintaining conditions is great! The behavior your describing, though, I've only encountered if you're using the Include option in your target. We had similar problems, and discovered that INCLUDE is super powerful--it will always override a condition tag that is set to Exclude in favor of including its content.

In the end, our sanity was best supported by favoring Exclude almost exclusively, and eliminating any special instances where we'd need Include (which, again, is only necessary if you need to override an Exclude tag; conditions, by default, are included).

[wclass]

I've also had success with the Advanced conditions option.
One tip I follow that might be useful for you - once you have a complicated setup with several product subsets, and training, and versions, then you need to make sure every topic is tagged with the right conditions. If you leave anything to be included/excluded by default then the results are not predictable.

[blindamood]

Thanks to MattyQ for the advice on favoring exclude conditions over include! This has cleared up an issue I was having when text was tagged with multiple conditions.

[ccardimon]

Conditions in Flare are really starting to make me question my sanity.

Me, too.

[blindamood]

Thanks to MattyQ for the advice on favoring exclude conditions over include! This has cleared up an issue I was having when text was tagged with multiple conditions.

OK, further testing has proved that I was a little quick to celebrate. This is harder than I initially thought. As a simple example, I have the following situation:

Product.Print and not (Product.Print and Product.User)

You would expect that something tagged with BOTH tags would be excluded, when, in fact, the Product.Print tag is overriding the exclusion. As described above, this should be remedied by removing Product.Print and just leaving the exclusion (i.e., the inclusion of Product.Print is implied). However, in this case, text tagged with just the one tag (Product.Print) is not appearing at all. I've tried numerous combinations to get this to work, and am failing miserably. (I expected Flare to make this easier than it was using Framemaker expressions, but in fact it seems just as complex.)

[NorthEast]

In that scenario you simply just need to exclude Product.User, since you're not actually doing anything at all with Product.Print. Using the AND is redundant since it doesn't matter if both Print and User are applied to the same tag, as you want to exclude User regardless.

Code: Select all

NOT Product.User

[dorcutt]

I have a pretty complicated setup, and I've managed to get by using the Basic conditioning only so far. I don't want to lose my friendly GUI with the sheer number of conditions that I have set up. I absolutely agree with using Include very sparingly, if ever. Making that change has allowed me to stay in my beloved Basic condition mode.

Additionally, one thing that has helped me enormously is using nested condition tags, though this clearly doesn't work in tables of contents (I have to resort to multiple ToC entries with different conditions/titles linked to the same topic sometimes). Inside topics, though, you can attain pretty complicated results with the basic setup if you "hide" text with varying conditions inside a larger condition tag.