MadCap Software Forums

Hey guys,

So I have a long-term project to try and implement context sensitive help into my company's product (online application). I did a bunch of research a few months ago to understand how Flare handles CSH (with topic IDs), and I think I have a decent understanding....

Having said that, I'm attempting to move forward with the project, but I've run into another problem: how do I determine which output is associated with a given ID? (for example: if a customer clicks a "?" icon in the UI, and that link is associated with a Flare topic ID, how do I determine which output will open?)

I suppose that the easy answer would be to only condition the topic specifically to which topic I'd want to open, but unfortunately it's not that simple for our Flare setup and our company's product (we have different outputs and conditions for different product UIs).

Any advice?

Apologies if I've misunderstood the question, but it sounds like what you're asking is something that's handled by your product - not in your Flare output.

When you make a CSH call, that is directed to one single output.

For example, if you have two outputs A and B in different folders, your product would make a CSH call to either outputA/Default.htm#cshid=xxx or outputB/Default.htm#cshid=xxx

So it's your product that needs to know which output to open.

Your developers should be able to handle this - i.e. have a variable in the URL path which switches depending on the user's product UI.


Each target/output can also have it's own alias file, which you set on the target's Advanced tab. So if you need an identifier to be linked to a different topic in each output, you can do that by using a separate alias file for each target.

Each target/output can also have it's own alias file, which you set on the target's Advanced tab.

Ahh! I think that should be my answer!




For further clarity: an example would be conditioning navigational differences in the UI within the topic - a procedure would have two lines for the same step conditioned to the two outputs for the two navigation differences. Since it wouldn't function well for us to have multiple copies conditioned to different outputs, using an alias file for the two outputs would suffice, I think!

Thanks Dave!