Complex Conditioning

[CarrieAcosta]

Hi all,

I think I'm hitting a pretty big wall here and I'm hoping that someone has some guidance before I drive through it.

We have a single massive project that serves the following HTML5 outputs:

- External Documentation
- Internal Documentation (same as external but with internal content embedded)

The TOC for these sites is quite large as we have the following sections:

- General Docs
- Host Information
- Host 1
- Soon to be Host 2
- Products
- Product 1
- Product 1 Version 2.x - each of these levels will have host information embedded currently
- Product 1 Version 3.x
- Product 1 Version 4.x
- Product 2
- Product 2 Version 2.x
- Product 2 Version 3.x
- Additional Products
- Product 3
- Product 4
- Product 5
- Tools (internal site only)

We are trying to use single-sourcing for versions under each product. We have now been told that there will be functionality shared between the two products (as well as versions underneath).

Right now, we are using separate source for Product 1 Version 2 and Product 1 Version 3. If we continue that for newer versions of Product 1 and also for Product 2 we get into a nightmare scenario for keeping all copies updated. Additionally, searching for a keyword would return one result for each version, muddying up the results.

So, I've turned each section into its own HTML5 target. That way I can keep the single-sourcing and include/exclude conditions as needed, plus searching is now limited to topics included in the TOC associated with that target (one search result per product). While this does mean duplication of topics across targets, I'm OK with that.

Tired yet?

This means now that I have gone from publishing one site to 9, all of which should be interlinked when they publish. Is there a way to accomplish this dependent build/publish without a) trying to move each section into its own project (won't work because of the large number of files shared between the sections) or b) having to hard-code the link to go back up to the main menu everywhere (because that's going to throw off the internal/external publish from the same source).

I know this is a lot - my brain has been in knots for about a week now. I would appreciate any help/guidance.

Carrie

[devjoe]

Let me see if I understand this.

You have one project.
Within that project you have made targets for Product 1 Version 2, Product 1 Version 3, Product 5, etc., with appropriate conditional formatting, and each of these builds to a separate folder, hopefully installed or hosted beside one another, with URLs such as:
somesite/product1version2/default.htm#topic.htm
somesite/product1version3/default.htm#topic.htm
somesite/product5/default.htm#topic.htm

Naturally, each of these is separate from the others, searches only run on the content in that output, etc.

You want to have links from the product 1 help to the product 5 help, or from the shared material into the help for the individual products.
You can do this, but you will have to specify the path manually as an external site. Start with enough ../ to escape from the Flare output, and keep in mind that somesite/product1version2/default.htm#topic.htm is actually a topic found at somesite/product1version2/Content/topic.htm, so you would need to write ../../product5/default.htm#topic.htm, which will open the product 5 help. You may want to code this to open in a new window, since this will replace all the navigation, etc. from the original help system with that from product5.

[roboHAL]

Carrie, in my opinion you've made things WAY to complicated. Seems to me the way to handle this is to use Concepts. Then add the concepts (each assigned to a product and/or version) as search filter items. - Hope that helps. Hal

[CarrieAcosta]

Thanks, devjoe - I came to your conclusion about 10 minutes after posting and it works beautifully! I also added a TOC called ReturnToMainMenu that has two topics - one is a link to the MainMenu topic of the internal site and the other a link to the MainMenu of the external site. I conditioned the internal topic only to print in the internal site and the external to print to the external site.

So I have the following independent targets:

InternalMainMenu - has manual links to all other targets using Internal URLs and DOES print internal-only content
InternalProduct1Version1 - prints internal-only content and contains the ReturnToMainMenu TOC conditioned only to print the Internal MainMenuURL
InternalProduct1Version2 - same as above
InternalProduct2Version1 - same as above
InternalProduct2Version2 - same as above
etc

ExternalMainMenu - has manual links to all other targets using External URLs and does NOT print internal-only content
ExternalProduct1Version1 - does not print internal-only content and contains the ReturnToMainMenu TOC conditioned only to print the External MainMenuURL
ExternalProduct1Version2 - same as above
ExternalProduct2Version1 - same as above
ExternalProduct2Version2 - same as above

It's a lot of work to set in the beginning, but everything else from here on out is creating content, conditioning, and adding to a single TOC for each target. This is exactly where we needed to be.

Thanks also to roboHAL - I looked into the idea of Concepts, but I don't think it will work with our current documentation structure for this current situation. I need to get this going very quickly so I'm going with the solution outlined above for now. I will, however, keep investigating this as it is intriguing and may solve other issues. I really appreciate the suggestion!

Carrie