Top nav menus

[carrollk]

Hi
We are in the process of creating a top nav output for a large documentation set. At the moment I am trying to structure the TOC so that I have at most five menus across the top with max 10 options. One of the menus is going to be a series of steps to walk through a typical scenario, for example, step 1 : Login (topic 1), step 2: Add details (topic 2), and so on. The other menus will contain options for all the tasks you can do with the application. My question is does it make sense to repeat the topic in another menu so that if someone is looking through the menu and wants to know how to add details (for example) they could find it as part of a scenario or they could find it in the more traditional way 2-3 levels down in a task based topic heading. This means that they will have the mini toc (with tasks you'd commonly do) on the topic page if they accessed it from the non-scenario based menu.


Thanks,
Karen

[NorthEast]

I'd suggest not to repeat the topic, mainly because it's awkward to handle in Flare.

If you include the same topic twice in the TOC, then things like the the breadcrumbs proxy, menu proxy, and miniTOC will not work properly, as a single topic can't be in two places. (A good example of how badly this works is Flare 10's help.)
A way round this is to create two separate topic files, which share the same content from a snippet; but then you'll have two virtually identical topics appearing in search results.

I would probably just have a 'steps' topic which describes 'why' you're doing the task, and have links from that to the 'how' topics.
It's a bit like how Flare 11 structures its help; the topics in 'Basic steps' introduce what you might want to do, and they link out to the 'Feature' topics which explain how to do it.

[milnermcfly]

I haven't thought this through entirely, but it occurred to me to build two topics to keep the integrity of the breadcrumbs, but using them as empty containers (more or less) into which you put a large snippet.