Forcing the side menu to display

[spatte22]

Hello, everyone!

I haven't found anything here on the forum similar to the issue I'm facing, so I figured it's time to create a new topic.


My Understanding:

My understanding is that when a topic is *not* added to the ToC but *is* hyperlinked/xrefed to somewhere else in the project, it will still get built and can be accessed via hyperlink/xref/search result in the output (html5). Also, if a topic is not in the ToC, the side menu will not display in the output when the topic is accessed (via search, xref, or whatever).


Question:

If my understanding is accurate, is it possible to make the side menu display in a topic that is not added to the ToC?

[NorthEast]

If you're talking about a menu proxy as the side menu, then:
(a) if it is set to be Context sensitive then the menu will not be displayed (which makes sense)
(b) if it is not set to be Context sensitive then the menu will always be displayed

[spatte22]

Ahhhh, ok (yes, I was talking about a menu proxy). I think that I'll be able to make it work. Thanks, Dave!

[ChoccieMuffin]

Another option is to make sure you DO include the topic somewhere sensible in the TOC. If you use the same TOC for online and PDF but want some topics to only appear in your online output, apply an OnlineOnly condition to those topics in the TOC and exclude that condition in your PDFs.

We do this in for our CHM outputs so our breadcrumbs work - similar behaviour that if the topic isn't in the TOC then no breadcrumb appears, so same principle. As an aside, if you have the same topic appearing in more than one place in a TOC you can also get a problem when the context menu doesn't know which instance to display, so in those circumstances we use separate topics that contain links to a single snippet.